by Selina Meyer
Add to all that the general air of violence and mayhem that beset the New England frontier. A great number of premature deaths resulted from conflict with Native American tribes who, though they have surely suffered greatly since, have much to answer for regarding their conduct during and immediately after their first contact with white Europeans. More than three hundred Eatons were scalped, tomahawked, bound and drowned, flayed, or burned alive before the Mohawks and Wampanoags were ultimately pacified. Many others simply disappeared in the historical record, and surely many of those fell prey to Indian mischief.
When the Native Americans did not slaughter my ancestors outright, they often kidnapped them and held them for ransom or sought to raise them as members of their tribes. One famous example is of Rebecca Eaton, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, who was taken by a band of Mashpee Indians while playing draughts outside her family’s farmhouse in Duxminster, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1667. Through an intermediary, their chief, Malauwaupeg, offered to return the girl for a ransom of flints, sewing needles, “spice” (by which, presumably, he meant salt), and ax heads. Rebecca’s father, Richard Eaton, declared that he would never pay any ransom and that the Indians were welcome to the girl, whom he described as an “ill-tempered mumchance fractious childe.”
The Indians who had taken Rebecca soon found themselves very much in agreement with her father and, in the end, were able to persuade him to take her back only by giving him a dozen beaver pelts, worth an enormous sum at the time.
And so, when all was said and done, barely twenty-five of my early ancestors lived to be forty and fewer than ten made it past fifty. Perhaps that is why ambition and precocious achievement have always run strong in the Eaton blood. For as the Early Eatons were living and, more often, dying, they were also building, exploring, and serving their communities. To put it another way, they had developed a taste for politics.
The men of that era distinguished themselves by service in colonial militias, those stout predecessors of the Minutemen, who gathered at a moment’s notice when the alarm was sounded to shoot their matchlocks and flintlocks ineffectually at stealthy Indians or noisy animals or others of their own number who had attempted to outflank an imaginary enemy and wound up being mistaken for their nonexistent foe. Those who by dint of owning property were allowed to vote voted, and they sometimes ran in local elections or sought appointment from the king’s representatives. In this pursuit they were often frustrated by the petty jealousies of others who would dispute their qualifications and sow dissension behind their backs. Still, some were elected, and one, Arthur Eaton, even held comparatively high office as private secretary to William Trumbull, the debauched governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but this seems mostly due to the fact that Governor Trumbull was wont to pleasure himself with Arthur’s wife, Caroline, and sometimes also with Arthur’s daughters, Martha and Winifred, and sometimes with two of the ladies at the same time, and occasionally with all three. For these purposes, Trumbull was inclined to keep Arthur Eaton and his attractive family close at hand and thus was moved to grant him the prestigious appointment.
As the years passed, the Eatons spread out from the point where they had disembarked from the Good Fortune, though some remained within one hundred yards or so for a century or more. Some traveled west to the very edges of Massachusetts, where they found the residents’ casual and self-centered style of living not to their liking and soon returned. Others journeyed to the genteel Old South, where the plantation culture and economy were beginning to emerge. Here these prodigal Eatons found much to like, and many settled down, spawning new branches of the family, among them the Eatons of Virginia, the Eatons of the Carolinas, the other, less good Eatons of Virginia, and the Wagners of Virginia, who were obliged to change their name as a consequence of some legal misunderstanding.
Although our Southern cousins never achieved the renown of the Washingtons or the Jeffersons, they still considered themselves to be people of high social standing, a position they sought to maintain through a financially complex process of purchasing, selling, and repurchasing slaves. What had quickly become apparent to the Southern branch was that social standing was measured by the number of slaves owned, and, almost as quickly, they determined that while the total number was important, few took note of the actually quality of the slaves. With their canny Yankee trading skills, they managed to develop a secondary market for old and infirm slaves who could be purchased at a steep discount and yet counted toward a family’s total slave headcount and thereby enhanced the family’s social position.
In some ways, as has often been true in our family’s history, the Southern Eatons were victims of their own success. As their secondary slave market prospered and grew, it became increasingly obvious to their more established neighbors what they were doing, and with the characteristic snobbery of provincial country gentry as well as the aristocratic disdain for anything that smacks of sharp dealing, the Eatons were shunned and forced to move on. Still, in those days of the young nation-yet-to-be, there were always new horizons and socialclimbing planters eager to claim high slave counts much the way the modern, status-conscious suburbanite will brag about the square footage of his McMansion and offer to show you his wine cellar.
The tumultuous years of the American Revolution brought change and, with it, as the Chinese proverb teaches us, opportunity. It is here in 1776 at one of history’s great inflection points that we shall leave behind the story of the Eatons generally and focus on my branch of the family in particular.
The Eatons have always answered the call to our nation’s service, whether it be responding to a census, filing tax returns, serving on juries, voting frequently, or being conscripted into military service Samuel Eaton was the first of our family’s many soldiers to achieve distinction on the battlefield. Rising from a humble private to become General Benedict Arnold’s aide-de-camp, Colonel Eaton played an essential but somewhat behind-the-scenes role in the eventual unmasking of Arnold as a traitor.
In reviewing contemporary accounts of the Arnold affair, sources are divided as to whether Samuel Eaton’s conduct in encouraging General Arnold to betray the British in order to expose him was a masterpiece of wily cunning or merely good fortune, and a court-martial seemed similarly perplexed. Nevertheless, in the end, even George Washington admitted that “the rascal Eaton has done the nation some service in betraying the betrayer before he himself could be betrayed.”
Two generations or, as one wag put it, “four score and seven years” later, Samuel’s grandson Major Morgan Eaton, a Union Army veterinarian, was mentioned in dispatches from Second Bull Run, where in less than ninety minutes he amputated more than two hundred limbs from men both wounded and healthy. On the other side of the Mason-Dixon Line, another of Samuel’s grandsons, Corporal Bradley Eaton Moorhouse, served with distinction as an orderly for Robert E. Lee and is credited with having created Lee’s distinctive hairstyle. After the Civil War, Bradley continued to serve Lee for the remainder of his life, setting out his clothes every morning, arranging flowers and interior furnishings in a way that Lee found pleasing, and continuing to barber and dress his hair. Family legend has it that Bradley Moorhouse handled the embalming, dressing, and final cosmetology of Lee’s corpse and that a framed handful of gray hair that for years hung on the walls of his descendants’ homes had come from Lee’s body, moistened, it was said, by the copious flow of Bradley Moorhouse’s tears.
In later life, Bradley Moorhouse changed his name to Robert E. Lee Jr. and became a star attraction in the traveling circus of Morris Monk, a competitor to P. T. Barnum, whose sideshow was considered almost as good.
World Wars I and II brought with them new experiences, new friends, and exciting opportunities for foreign travel. An emerging family tradition of service in the Quartermaster Corps found many Eaton cousins ensconced behind the lines, working diligently and often without much thanks to ensure that the troops in their care were supplied
with, as Floyd Eaton put it in a letter home, “both soup and soap and I’ll be damn-d if I can tell the difference!”
On my mother’s side of the family, her father, Howard Norris Melville, was a notable personality of the Gilded Age, beginning as a rent collector for J. P. Morgan, eventually becoming a stockbroker specializing in the nascent chemical industry, and finally being named a partner in the venerable investment bank First Boston. His mother, Dorcas, was a central figure of one of the great scandals of the era when she left his father and briefly became the Countess of Belgravia after marrying a visiting British nobleman, Gerald, the seventh Earl of Belgravia, then on a tour of the United States, who was eventually exposed as one Stanislaus Poniciewicz, a penniless Polish immigrant and bigamist. The meeting of five different “Countesses of Belgravia” in a courthouse lobby forms the basis for Edith Wharton’s acclaimed short story “The Countesses’ Lament.”*
After Poniciewicz’s sentencing to ten years in prison, Dorcas Melville took to her bed, declaring that the only person she ever loved was “my poor Stanny.” She never wavered in her affection, even after he returned to her upon his release from prison and stole her life savings of $14,000 (the equivalent of $45 million today if invested in Apple stock at the right time) and a framed lock of Robert E. Lee’s hair.
It is said that Colonel Melville never forgave his mother for the teasing at school he was forced to suffer as a consequence of her indiscretions but that nevertheless he sought to please her, claiming, as her lover the bogus earl had, to have earned various fictitious distinctions, including degrees from Harvard and Yale, the ownership of a magnificent country house of which he showed her many pictures (it was actually the local high school), to be a descendent of the writer Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick, and to be a colonel in the U.S. Army as well as a general in the Mexican Army.
It is possible that this genetic gift for prevarication assisted my grandfather in his rise to a position of significance in the capital markets of his time. A bit of doggerel from the Knickerbocker sketches describes him thus: “Let’s hear a cheer for Colonel Melville / Of honey’d words yet fork’d tongue / Ne’er met a stock he couldn’t sell / And ’twill swindle the Devil when he gets to Hell.”
My mother, his only child, was raised in an atmosphere of comfort and privilege in Darien, Connecticut. Her mother, the colonel’s wife, Caroline Calvert, a fragile, vaporous woman of delicate constitution,* was called “Dips” or “Dipsy”—short for “Dipsomaniac”—and spent most of her days indulging a boundless enthusiasm for motion-picture magazines, reading them over and over and cutting out pictures of movie stars to make elaborate collages in which the stars appeared to be attending a glamorous party at bwhich she was the hostess.† As soon as my mother was old enough she was sent away to school, first to Foxcroft, where she developed a powerful attachment to Roberto, the handsome bay stallion she was assigned as a member of the school’s justly famed equestrian program. After Mother stayed out after curfew and was eventually found asleep in Roberto’s stable stall after an extensive search, the colonel ordered Roberto destroyed, for which my mother never forgave him.
In due course Mother went on to Smith and then embarked upon a year of travel and study in Europe with her college roommate, Martha Ostergaard. There she met her first husband, “Prince” Guido Rimaldi, while skiing in St. Moritz. After a whirlwind courtship lasting barely a week, they were married in a small Alpine church. Two days later, Rimaldi began an affair with mother’s friend Martha and then divorced my mother and married Martha. Ten days after that, my mother reconciled with Rimaldi and he divorced Martha. A month later, driving a race car purchased for him as a wedding gift by my mother, he crashed during the Monaco Grand Prix, killing himself and eleven spectators, including four children. The race stewards blamed the accident on my mother, who, it was alleged, energetically waved at Rimaldi while wearing an excessively form-fitting sweater as he attempted to navigate the legendarily hazardous “Widowmaker Squeeze.”
After this series of unfortunate events, Mother returned to the bosom of her family in good spirits thanks to certain pharmacological innovations that had recently become popular in Switzerland. Mother claimed for the rest of her life that she deserved credit for introducing Valium, Librium, and quaaludes to the American market and was the first person to discover the compound beneficial effects of mixing all three of these medications with a jigger of bourbon.
Concerned that my mother’s heart had not been sufficiently broken by her recent experiences, my grandfather arranged for my mother to begin playing tennis with a young associate of his, Gordon Dunn Eaton, a dashing graduate of the Harvard Business School who had won varsity letters in rowing and tennis as an undergraduate at Hamilton College. Though my father was eager to accommodate my grandfather, who was also his boss, by playing tennis with his daughter, sparks did not fly between the couple. They quickly compromised on a system by which my father would hit a tennis ball against a backboard for forty-five minutes while my mother watched and took tranquilizers. She would later say that once she achieved the proper biochemical equilibrium, she found the rhythm of the ball striking the backboard strangely soothing.
Impatient at being uncharacteristically thwarted in his plan to have my father take his daughter off his hands, Grandfather eventually offered the couple $100,000 (or nearly $80 million in today’s money if it had been used to buy a large Park Avenue apartment) to get married. To their credit, both my parents independently demanded that they receive their payments in cash.
As my father’s charm, good looks, and evasion of the Vietnam draft brought him steady success in banking, he eventually decided to break ties with my grandfather and set out on his own. Daddy had determined that certain vulnerable public companies could be pushed to the brink of insolvency and then taken over at a steep discount through the rapid purchase of ownership stakes, even if the shares were borrowed. Once the takeover was complete, the company could be rapidly dismantled and the assets and constituent parts sold off in order to repay the loan of the shares and still retain a nice profit.
Ten years after their marriage, my parents relocated to Centreville, Maryland, where, flush from a recent successful corporate raid, my father purchased a 1,400-acre gentleman’s farm, Bentcrest. It was in that bucolic setting where, every April 15, after filing one of his famously creative tax returns, my father would initiate his annual sexual encounter with my mother. On one such occasion, perhaps under the influence of a new mix of sedatives, she acceded to his demands, and nine months later, I was born.
A brief word about the family of my ex-husband, Andrew Meyer, whose name I bear. Their origins are shrouded in the mists of Mitteleuropa, from whence they issued forth, fleeing persecution of various kinds. Ashkenazi Jews originally from Galicia in what is now Poland, the Meyers moved first to Transylvania, then Romania, then Moldova, then Greece, then Danzig, then Hungary, then back to Romania, then Slovakia, then Slovenia, then Lithuania, then Turkey, then Egypt, then Mandate Palestine, then Italy, and then Portugal, before settling in Pennsylvania, where they built a small business selling mildly radioactive patent medicines. Theirs, too, is a quintessentially American story of perseverance and industry, even though it took place mostly in Europe and in some cases in countries that no longer exist.
* The History of the Good Fortune and Its Passengers, Harriet Gilchrist and Jordan Mcleod, fourth edition, Boston, MA: American Genealogy Publishing, 1966, page I.
† In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that some genealogists have suggested that the “Josiah Eaton” who sailed on the Good Fortune was actually an entirely different man with an entirely different name who assumed the identity of Josiah after being accused of witchcraft.
* Being deceived by bogus European noblemen is a bit of a family tradition for the Eatons, as you will see in a few paragraphs and also later in Chapter Twelve: On the Run Again—Campaigning in the “Real” America.
* Caroline Calvert was
herself the descendent of a long-established American family whose most famous member was her nephew James, who under the stage name of “Lily de Valley” was a drag queen and a leading light in the glittering world of Paris in the ’20s.
† She was also at one point the chair of the fund-raising committee for the Darien Library and a vice president of the Connecticut Junior League, but those were both pretty much no-show jobs and never interfered with her collages.
A Woman First:
First Woman
CHAPTER ONE
Mornings on Horseback, Evenings at the Library—My Early Years
If the boy is the father of the man, then it follows that the girl must be the mother of the woman. Although I am very much a modern woman, I’m not one of these self-pitying, therapy addicts who enjoys spending hours reviewing every moment of her childhood with an expensive psychiatrist in the hopes of gaining new insights into her adult self and perhaps make some kind of peace with her inner demons, fostered in youth but who only began to rear their ugly heads in later life.
I find that sort of thing self-indulgent. And, plus, how much can one really learn about a person from their childhood?
I do not believe that my parents really ever loved each other. They were a product of an earlier time, not so far removed from the days when marriages were arranged at all strata of society as dynastic unions among the great and grand or, for the middle classes, just a way of safeguarding respectability and keeping small family businesses or farms afloat into the next generation. Although she never said so, I have reason to believe that my mother’s family regarded my father with some suspicion, thinking his family belonged to a slightly lower caste of the upper class than they did. As the proprietors of a consumer-facing business, the Consolidated Bank of Maryland, Daddy’s family was technically “in trade,” as my mother’s family saw it, and beneath the notice of large landowners like her family, who had built dozens of slums and tenements in Baltimore’s depressed Belair-Edison neighborhood to house the enormous influx of Italian and Jewish immigrants who arrived at the turn of the nineteenth century and who carried on in a one-thousand-year-old feudal tradition.