The Astor Orphan (10 page)

Throughout the generations, the family's greatest challenge had been coexisting amicably and equably at Rokeby. With co-owners living under one roof, there was bound to be a struggle for dominance. At Rokeby, the nonconformists had always lost the contest.

In the past, Aldriches and Astors had banished family members under the pretexts of bohemianism and insanity. In fact, artists had always been viewed with suspicion at Rokeby. John Jay Chapman perhaps expressed the family's distrust of artists best when he wrote “[Artists] are invariably corrupt and irregular in their private lives and in their ideas. . . . Most of them are foreigners—Italians, Frenchmen and Russians and you know what foreigners are. They don't speak the truth, or pay their bills, or keep the Sabbath.”

Mom was an artist. But while she was foreign, she was not at all irregular. When she wasn't chasing after Dad to fix things or give her money, she sat at her drafting table for hours, drawing, etching, painting. As a child, Mom—like me—had been a high achiever. She'd always been the very best student in her class—diligent, precise, and serious. She'd filled albums with incredible childhood drawings. When I was little—before her sadness and powerlessness set in like a disease—Mom had had lots of energy for self-improvement. She'd taken swimming and driving lessons, and consumed Agatha Christie novels to learn English.

Like the old creamery, our apartment was a bastion of bohemian living on the estate. Only there did Mom freely display her tapestries, engravings, and paintings, as well as her posters from Bread and Puppet—a folkish puppet theater with politically leftist leanings. These latter were rough paintings of some of the central characters of the idealized Communist society: washerwomen in kerchiefs, with oversize papier-mâché heads, and garbagemen in gray workers' uniforms, gloves, and boots.

“I thought you wanted to get away from the Communists,” Dad would chide.

I did not choose to view myself as bohemian. I understood that in my own family, being an unconventional person with artistic leanings was grounds for exclusion, a reason to be deprived of everything, including the right to identify as an Aldrich.

Surrounded by whimsical, unstructured people who did what they pleased whenever they pleased, I genuinely idealized a respectable and disciplined life. I longed to live in a house with modern heating and plumbing. I dreamed of having a presentable car and parents with jobs.

But what could I have been, really, if not bohemian? I was a free spirit who watched unrated, arty foreign films with Mom and dressed in vintage clothing from the local thrift shop. Our living quarters were furnished with random, broken hand-me-downs. We didn't live by rules that coincided in any way with those of the outside world. We never had a dinnertime or matching dinnerware. I had no set bedtime. I did not own pajamas or a nightgown.

T
HE MOST FAMOUS
bohemian to be exiled from the family was Sam Ward, brother of Julia Ward Howe. “Uncle Sam” had married Emily, one of W. B. Astor's daughters. He had been a Renaissance man, infinitely charming and social, loose with money, open-minded, and always looking for a good time. Emily died when their daughter, Maddie, was just two years old. As soon as Uncle Sam remarried—to a Creole woman—the W. B. Astors took custody of their granddaughter and raised her as their own child at Rokeby, banning Uncle Sam from the property and forbidding him from ever seeing his daughter.

While the vivacious Uncle Sam had clashed with his cheerless, conservative Astor in-laws, he had been extremely popular with most everyone else, according to a
Vanity Fair
article published January 10, 1880, as part of a series entitled “Men of the Day.” A copy hung in the big house's home parlor.

It was not difficult to see why such a man would not have gotten along with the parsimonious W. B. Astor, the slumlord of lower Manhattan who had left hardly any of his massive fortune to charity. But despite his banishment, Uncle Sam's free-spirited genes seem to have been passed down through the generations.

In the Astor orphans' generation, the line between bohemian and straitlaced had become blurred, as all of the orphans had been unconventional to varying degrees. Only Great-Grandma Margaret had stood apart, a guard of order who kept alive the family tradition of banishing family members at will.

John Armstrong Chanler, Great-Grandma Margaret's brother, known to us as Uncle Archie, was ostracized on the grounds of insanity. He had been left extra money by his mother because, as the eldest Astor orphan, he was expected to take care of Rokeby. She also hoped he would settle at Rokeby and keep the Chanler name alive in the Hudson Valley. But he moved far away, settling in Virginia.

Archie was admittedly a bit odd. He reportedly drove a car that contained a kitchen and a bathtub. When he visited Rokeby, he was said to have eaten grass on the Astor china in the dining room and climbed in and out of his second-floor bedroom window in the middle of the night by way of a ladder, then slept all day. He also experimented with psychic phenomena. For instance, he attempted to channel the spirit of Napoléon Bonaparte. He believed that his subconscious, which he called his “x factor,” would send him messages, which he could express through “automatic writing” while in a trancelike state.

But Archie's alleged lunacy was likely a fabrication. His troubles began when he invested money, together with his brother Wintie and Wintie's friend Stanford White, in a few enterprises in Virginia. Archie soon asked Wintie to step down as chairman of the board of the company.

To prevent being deposed, Wintie conspired with their brother Lewis and Stanford White to have Archie declared insane and incarcerated in an asylum. This move put a temporary stay on Archie's power of attorney over Rokeby's finances and cut him off from access to his own money and property.

For four years, Archie stayed at Bloomingdale Insane Asylum in White Plains, New York, under round-the-clock supervision. When Archie appealed to his other siblings for help, they all deferred to Wintie's and Lewis's judgment in the matter.

When Archie finally managed to escape from Bloomingdale, he left the following characteristically witty note for the asylum's medical superintendent.

Feeling his family's betrayal keenly, this Chanler, who was meant to carry on the family name, took his revenge by changing his surname to Chaloner.

Was Uncle Archie more mentally ill than Great-Grandma Margaret's brother-in-law John Jay Chapman, who had to be kept in Rokeby's billiard room on the third floor for eighteen months due to delusions and imagined paralysis, and who purposely burned his hand so severely that it had to be amputated? John Jay Chapman was never institutionalized for mental illness. The primary difference between the two men seemed to lie in their relationship to the Astor fortune.

In our generation, the law entitled Dad to the same rights as his brother, so his nuclear family could not legally be sequestered and denied privileges. Yet, really, we had been banished—to the third floor. We lived in the eaves.

Courtesy of Michele Michahelles

F
ortunately for me, the family did not associate classical music with bohemianism. My great-grandparents Aldrich had made a life of music respectable.

It was the middle of June. Giselle was now at Rokeby every day. She and Dad were taking me to my end-of-the-year violin recital. Dad rarely attended my various recitals or school events, because Rokeby's needs always came first. Today, I was too excited that he was finally coming to one of my recitals to worry about why Giselle was joining us instead of Mom.

When I'd asked Mom if she planned to come, she'd snorted in bored contempt. “You know I don't like the sound of children playing the violin. I don't like being around kids at all, if I can help it.”

“But I'm a kid.”

“Yes, but you're different. You're my daughter.”

Mom would occasionally try to disguise her indifference to my activities by telling me how much she valued my independence and my freedom to make my own decisions. She would explain how she had promised herself that she would not be an overbearing parent as her own mother had been. But even then I knew that it was simply easier for her if Grandma Claire took care of me, or if I took care of myself.

Dad, on the other hand, was pleased that I was so self-motivated and musically talented. He doled out compliments about my playing freely as long as he didn't have to pay for the lessons.

Giselle seemed to have permanently claimed the middle seat between Dad and me in the cab of the Chevy. As we started down the carriage drive and Dad shifted the gears, his hand knocked against Giselle's fleshy shin. With each jolt of the truck's shifting gears, the nose of my violin case stabbed her in the arm.

I was wearing my special red concert dress. It had two layers, both red, with satin underneath and stiffened gossamer on top. The top layer was covered with white polka dots that felt bumpy where they'd been painted on. The way it was tight at the waist, then blossomed out into a full skirt, made me think of flying.

But just as I was picturing myself impressing the parents with my performance of the Vivaldi A-minor concerto, we heard a telltale flapping sound.

“Yup, I was afraid of this!” The gears began to grind as Dad hastily shifted down. He swung out to look. “She's flat.”

I felt the familiar symptoms of panic—it was as though my heavy heart was leaning against my lungs and making me short of breath. Grandma Claire wouldn't let Dad use her car if Giselle was with us, and Dad would never tell Giselle that she couldn't come. So I'd have to get Grandma Claire to drive me to my recital. I hadn't even told her about the recital because she'd been hitting the bottle so hard lately. While I was ashamed of her red nose and cloudy eyes, at least if Grandma Claire drove me, Giselle wouldn't be there. I didn't want the extra worry of having to explain Giselle to people, especially since no one had really explained her to me. And I didn't want the shame of Giselle's being at my recital while Mom wasn't.

As the passenger door wouldn't open from the inside, I stuck my arm out the window—which was always open because the crank had fallen off—to reach the outside handle. I opened the door and started race-walking down the hill to Grandma Claire's house, my violin case rocking like a buoy in choppy water. The dusty driveway quickly powdered my shiny black patent leather concert shoes, whose slight heels made me feel grown-up.

“Grandma?” My shoes clicked into her musty, salmon-tiled atrium.

“Yes . . . ,” a faint voice called in alarm from her room. I found her seated on her bed, slightly slumped over, with her feet on the floor. I didn't want to look at her. Whenever she was “in a state,” as Aunt Olivia called it, I had a strong impulse to sit down with her and write up a schedule and a set of rules—a plan for us to follow.

But there was no time for that now. She was dressed in her blue-and-white-checked pants and red polyester blouse—J. C. Penney specials. Her thick horn-rimmed glasses were sliding off her reddened nose. The skin of her neck hung loose like a turkey's. Her eyes looked out at everything at once, overwhelmed as if by something swarming around her.

“Do you need help getting up?” I asked, though it made me queasy to see her, of all people, looking so lost. But I had to suppress my fear, as well as the surge of rage that made me want to beat her sober. I could not fall apart before the recital. We had fewer than fifteen minutes to get there.

“No, no. Just go watch some TV and I'll be right out,” she said, not registering that I was dressed up and holding a violin case.

“Well actually, I came to ask if you could take me to my recital.”