The Astor Orphan (9 page)

As I began to play, Grandma Claire sang along under her breath.

Grandma Claire's melodramatic reaction to the song distracted me. Her eyes teared up, as they always did when I played this, her most frequently requested tune. She sat with her hands clasped, wet eyes expectant, in silent awe.

It irked me that she would cry in the presence of others. What was it, anyway, that she was remembering with so much sadness? Perhaps it was her first love, whom her father prevented her from marrying by sending her off to Florence during her senior year of high school.

After I played, Grandma Claire and Aunt Olivia settled in to a game of Scrabble. Grandma would play Scrabble any time she could find a willing opponent. She loved to trick her partner into branching out toward the triple word scores in the corners of the board. Once they'd built their words to the edge, she would try to use the high-score letters she'd been hoarding to form her favorite words, like “zit” and “quo.” But her performance tonight lacked this kind of strategy.

“Now, Claire, do you want to put down ‘medal' or ‘meddle'? Are you sure you're all right to play this game?” Aunt Olivia asked.

“Yes, yes—
hiccup
—I'm jus' fine. Now, let me see here. . . .”

Maggie and Diana were in the kitchen washing the dishes, since I had cleared the table. The dirty dishes soaked in one side of the double sink. Diana stood on a stool and sponged off each plate as she removed it from the warm water, then passed it to Maggie, who rinsed it in the other basin and set it on the drying rack.

Dad had fallen asleep in the recliner and was snoring loudly with his head back and his mouth open while Uncle Harry read the
New York Times
.

I too was beginning to feel drowsy from the smell of wine and the soft light from the candles around the room.

I did not wish to wait for Mom and Dad, who were always the last to leave. Maggie and Diana would get driven back up to the big house by Uncle Harry later. So, I decided now was the time to slip out the kitchen door.

So many times, I'd walked home from Grandma's after dark. Tonight there was no moon and it was pitch-black outside. My feet knew the way by heart, knew all the uneven spots along the steep hill.

Peepers from the pond just north of Grandma's house were singing their lungs out in a spring chorus. They sounded like little birds, confusedly chirping at night instead of at dawn. We could never swim in the peepers' pond because it housed water snakes and snapping turtles as well. But it was fun to stand by its edge, listen to the low bass notes of the bullfrogs, and watch the water bugs run on top of the pond's surface.

The spring air was unpredictable. I imagined the blasts of warmth that intermingled with chilly streams to be stray ghosts. My imagination was filled with ghosts.

Nonetheless, I'd learned not to be afraid of the dark. I felt brave, pushing forward into the blackness, listening to the sound of my own footsteps clipping along the hard dirt road.

Courtesy of Ralph Gabriner

Courtesy of Georgiana Warner

R
okeby was a haven for those who dwelled in the margins.

Some of the marginalized refugees included Dad's various charity cases and protégés. Others were legitimate Rokeby tenants.

Almost all our tenants were somewhat bohemian, as the rental houses were not fancy. To Uncle Harry, who had inherited an attitude of scorn for any form of business, the tenants were a necessary evil. Grandma Claire, on the other hand, felt it was her responsibility to foster unity among members of the legitimate Rokeby community—i.e., paying customers—and so she would regularly invite the tenants to dinner.

The old creamery was the center of bohemian life at Rokeby, inhabited by two creative and unconventional women, Debbie and Mimi. Debbie organized seasonal pageants at Rokeby. These would usually be held out in one of Rokeby's fields with fifty or more volunteers—whom Grandma Claire termed “riffraff” and Uncle Harry referred to as “drifters”—awaiting directions as to where and how to move with their papier-mâché masks, banners, and various other props. Larger than life with her wild, frizzy hair; broad, toothy smile; and grand plans and ideas, Debbie reminded me of Glinda, the good witch of the north from
The Wizard of Oz
.

Mimi was a Cuban-American artist with shiny black hair and bushy eyebrows. She had first come to Rokeby as part of a sort of gypsy/vaudeville show with her then husband—a bald, gap-toothed man about twenty years her senior who had started out as her college film professor. They would drive around in a Mercedes, hauling a trailer behind them, and perform sideshows with their German shepherd named Billy Jean, who had been trained to walk on her hind legs in a dress.

While Dad did not identify with Rokeby's bohemians and artists, they all adored him. To them, he was a miraculous mix of classically educated WASP and generous free spirit whose very lifestyle was a masterpiece. As their landlord, Dad was Rokeby's high priest, who enjoyed the privilege of stopping in at any one of the tenant houses at any time of day or night to eat his rightful share, which was inevitably followed by ice cream with caramel sauce. The tenants would keep this on hand for just such occasions.

Mom, Dad, and I would frequently go over to Debbie and Mimi's creamery for “dinner”—which would involve musical or dramatic performances and storytelling. There, we could always expect to hear exotic music—Gypsy, Balkan, Indian, Jewish—see decorative costumes, and try new recipes. There, one could say or do anything, and it would seem brilliant and entertaining. The creamery was a world of fantasy and pageantry, a world where everyone wore a mask and costume and nothing was ordinary or mundane. And in contrast to the big house, it was a place without judgment, a place of free expression.

Mom would become a whole other person at the old Rokeby creamery, a person I never saw when I was alone with her. She would laugh, recite extemporaneous poetry, and forget to complain about Dad.

Among the other tenants was Alex, long haired, bearded, and lanky, with a large protruding Adam's apple, who rented the milk house. He kept milk crates full of books and records, mostly the Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones.

There was Matt, who lived in the apartment on the second floor of the coach house, a graduate of MIT's School of Architecture. On summer weekends, Matt would blast hits from musicals like
Oklahoma
and
West Side Story
from his balcony. Dad promised one day to build the house Matt had designed for his thesis—what Dad called the “house of the future”—at Rokeby.

It was the denizens of this world whom Mom had invited over to the big house for her summer solstice party.

A motley crew of guests wearing painted foam fish on their heads was gathered in the sparsely furnished formal dining room, now hazy with cigarette smoke.

Debbie and Mimi entered the room dressed in their dancing-bear costumes—brown fake-fur suits with stuffed bellies, giant papier-mâché heads, and cute toothy smiles.

Dressed in a suit and not acknowledging anyone, Uncle Harry stood in a corner of the dining room with his back to the guests. These were not the type of people Uncle Harry wanted overrunning and defining the place. His friends were respectable: old roommates from boarding school, fellow club members from Harvard, and various local people interested in historic preservation.

Uncle Harry's obvious disapproval made me feel that by participating in this wild party, I was somehow guilty of doing something corrupt and inappropriate. As he glanced proprietarily at the portraits, I doubted that the ancestors would have been any more approving than he was of the rabble gathered here, in this,
their
house, marring its elegance and embarrassing their staid dignity.

At one end of the dining room were portraits of Great-Grandma Margaret and Great-Grandpa Richard Aldrich—proud and pompous. At the other end was their daughter, Aunt Maddie, divorced and exiled, as well as Emily Astor, who had been charmed into marriage by the infinitely charismatic Sam Ward. Also present: General Armstrong, William B. Astor, and Grandma Claire. Grandma was a different person in the portrait, with her curls still black; her back still straight; beads of jade around her long, modestly exposed neck; her mouth closed with teeth already clenched, stiffly self-conscious—so beautiful, yet never carefree, not even then.

Grandma Claire never came to our parties. She was only comfortable as a hostess of her own gatherings—necessarily structured around meals.

Some guests lounged in the home parlor—a term we used because “family parlor” sounded too bourgeois—splayed over the room's silk-upholstered chairs and corduroy sofa. Others stood around the gramophone, which had been a personal gift from Thomas Edison to Great-Grandpa Richard Aldrich. As Dad cranked it up, the quarter-inch-thick record began to speed up until it sounded like “Ragtime.”

Then interest shifted to the collection of iceboat photographs hanging on the home parlor's wall.

“My father was an iceboater,” Dad explained. “FDR gave him an iceboat called the
Jack Frost
. FDR would frequently come visit the Delanos next door, who were his very close relatives, and then stop by at Rokeby. I don't know if he ever knew that my grandmother didn't vote for him in the '32 election. . . .”

Uncle Harry now approached me. “If you see anyone who doesn't belong in other parts of the house, be sure to drive them out.”

Uncle Harry wanted to make the younger generation his accomplices in checking up on the guests. In training to drive these undesirables out of Rokeby, we were instructed to interrogate any strangers we saw on the property. Inevitably, however, they would say they were “friends of Ted's,” and we would simply have to move on.

I nodded my consent to Uncle Harry's request and proceeded across the front hall, where I came upon an unfamiliar couple drifting around in the drawing room.

The man pointed out the giant, gilt-framed mirror behind the Steinways. The mirror itself was so aged that it was gray and no longer reflective.

“I think that mirror has seen so much vanity that it decided to close for further business. If someone tried to search for himself in it, he'd only be swallowed up.”

“A mirror that consumes images . . . ,” the woman said. “I'll bet that's what this place will do to a person after a while.”

W
HEN THE CALL
for performances began, I was asked to play something on the violin. I felt self-conscious about asking the guests to stand still and listen quietly and respectfully as I performed the first movement of a Handel sonata. But everyone clapped politely when I was done.

Next, two of Dad's friends, both named Bob, got up to sing some World War I songs, as they always did at our parties.

The final act tonight was Mimi doing her famously hilarious Louis Armstrong impersonation, which she would agree to do only once she was good and drunk. She puffed up her cheeks and puckered her lips, and her naturally deep voice grew much deeper as she began to sing “Blueberry Hill.”

She held up an imaginary trumpet. “Blow that horn, Louis!” the spectators shouted, cheering.