The Attempt (10 page)

Mornings on the lake had always been the most beautiful. The surrounding woods were filled with birds singing, and it was so lovely having coffee served on the veranda. The children were able to run around in the fresh air, far away from the blast furnaces of the steel mills, the chimneys spewing smoke and ash over the city day and night. Now all that was left of the lake was a muddy crater with the original bed of the Conemaugh River winding along its bottom.

The ocean was calm throughout the voyage. They made it to Liverpool in seven days. John C. wanted to stay in London, but Alice was eager to see Paris, so she decided to go ahead and take the children with her. They stayed at the Hotel Belle Europe.

While he was in London, John C. met with art dealers, exchanged telegrams with George about the situation in
Pittsburgh, and studied the Wallace Collection of paintings in detail. He also bought a new set of undergarments and a tuxedo. Meanwhile, in Paris, Alice had two dresses sewn at the internationally renowned House of Worth: an ivory-colored ball gown of silk, decorated with lace and silver threads, and an afternoon gown in a warm red-brown shade. Princess Metternich was said to have ordered a similar dress the same year for her autumn strolls through Vienna.

I think that the spring of 1889, when the flood swept Johnstown away, was the last time my great-grandmother Alice felt young. As if the Johnstown disaster put a curse on the family.

At night, she sometimes dreamed that she was Anna Fenn. Gasping for breath, groping about in the wet and dark, her fingers brushing up against cold objects, terrified to the point that she awoke with a loud scream, and the only thing that would calm her down was a spoonful of the laudanum she kept by her bedside.

She wanted to love her husband and bear him children. She hadn't expected to be punished for it.

Once, after Martha died, she secretly went to visit the flooded town. She took the train part of the way, but she didn't dare set foot inside the local station, so she hired a coach instead. It had been exactly two years since the flood, and the whole region was coming back to life. The repaired steelworks was up and running, a new library was being built, and the wooden houses had a fresh coat of paint. Young trees lined the waterfront. They had managed to clear away all the wreckage, and the only reminder left in places was the sweetish smell of river mud.

Alice didn't step out of the carriage, for fear she might be recognized. She sent the driver to ask where the Fenns lived, but he came back empty-handed. The only member of the stove maker's family still alive was Anna, but she had moved away.

Alice made him go back and ask in depth about everything. After Anna's eighth child was stillborn, she had gone to live with her relatives in Virginia, and had stayed there ever since. She got remarried and her name was Maxwell now. Or something like that.

Alice told the driver to take her to the cemetery. The white slabs of the tombstones stretched to the horizon. Somewhere among them were the graves of the eight dead children of Anna Fenn. There were also seven hundred nameless flood victims buried here, who were never identified.

She remembers the letters her mother sent to the East Coast hotels where she spent her honeymoon trip. The delicate envelopes faithfully awaiting her every morning to take into her warm bed and read over morning coffee while John C. perused the mail and leafed through the daily papers. At the end of each letter, Alice's mother begged her not to show them to her husband, embarrassed at her flowing, spidery handwriting and at how banal the contents seemed to her: “We miss you so much. I hope you will come see us as often as possible. You could spend your days with us and have Mr. K. pick you up on his way home from work and stay for tea
—
it would give us the feeling of having the family back together again.”

“Tell Mr. K. the Japanese vases are magnificent. We are much obliged for his gifts.”

In one of the letters, in between bits of gossip from home, it said, “Submit to your husband's will in all things.”

But I can't when it comes to this, Alice argues now with her dead mother.

You must!

Alice stops the maid as she prepares to serve the soup. She'll do it herself. Today is the last time the whole family will eat lunch together. She stands, picks up the ladle, dips it into the serving dish, and reaches for her husband's bowl, expecting him to hand it to her. But John C. ignores her. Leaning in toward their daughter, he whispers something in her ear, and Ellie bursts out in laughter. Tom absentmindedly fiddles with his silverware. Alice stands a moment, ladle in hand, arm outstretched toward her husband. Finally she lets go of the ladle, splattering soup on her clothes, and John C. lifts his head. Tom squirms, expecting the usual scene to transpire. His mother will burst into tears, then make a rapid exit. But this time it's different. Alice's legs give way and she drops to the ground without a word. The servants come racing in and carry her up to bed. Nobody panics. But the incident confirms John C.'s belief that, despite his wife's objections, Tom needs to get out of the house as soon as possible.

The next morning Tom's father drove him to the station, and from there they continued on first-class to Cambridge, where the boy was entering boarding school. From Cambridge, John C. Kolman traveled directly to New York, boarded a ship, and sailed to Europe. He stayed three months. While he was away, his secretary, George, sent him detailed reports on everything happening at home.

For several weeks after her husband's and son's departure, Alice withdrew behind the heavy drapes of her bedroom, writing Tom letters filled with instructions on how he should behave to avoid colds, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and all the other illnesses that could easily kill a twelve-year-old boy living far from home. She cried the whole day through, imagining her son with no one to ensure that he didn't go outdoors without a hat and that he drank his daily two glasses of milk. The nanny took care of Ellie, who was two. Sometimes Alice would call her daughter to come to her bedside, but she would quickly send her away again when Ellie's babbling got on her nerves.

When she finally left her room, it was November. As George wrote John C., “She keeps herself busy cleaning and tidying up the house, but I think there are times she overdoes it and then she's extremely tired.” Someone had to supervise the maids as they remade the house for winter, taking down and washing the summer curtains, and hanging up the winter tapestries stored in chests over the summer. Cleaning the carpets and upholstery, and removing the dust that had accumulated on the fabric wallpaper over the summer.

After she lost Tom, she stopped sleeping with her husband. She didn't want any more children. Withdrawing into herself, she tended only to her dressing gowns and rose beds. Outwardly, she remained calm, but it was a calm dependent on the bottle of laudanum she kept by the side of her bed.

She was thirty-five. In photos from that time, she is even more beautiful than when she got married. She refused to pose, instead sitting casually, looking directly into the lens. Her soft
white shoulders and neck stand out against the black fabric of her low-cut dress, her arms crossed on her chest. No smile. Her dark eyes, elongated toward the temples, have an absent look, giving the slight impression of vacuousness.

The furnishing of their new estate on the Atlantic coast took place without her involvement, as did the construction of their residence in New York. Her body relocated, but in her mind she was elsewhere. At around fifty, she stopped walking and had to be carried in a wheelchair. To walk upright required more will than she possessed.

Or I could be wrong and everything my great-grandmother Alice did was in fact evidence of a healthy desire to survive. With her mental vacancy, her tincture of opium, and her confinement to the wheelchair, she carved out a space for herself where her husband could not get at her; his aggression was confined to comments over meals. Even during his bouts of arthritis, she no longer had to sit by his bed and change his compresses. Ellie did it instead.

Alice became noticeably livelier after Kolman's death. She began to take pleasure in food again, and in flowers, too. Nothing made her happier than saving money. She maintained an active correspondence with all their contractors and battled with them over every cent. It was like a sort of revenge on John. He bought presidents and she, his wife, argued over small change. Her small, belated rebellion.

In the days shortly before her death, she was childlike, almost happy. She rose to the surface and stayed there, among the small pleasures. The sky was as blue as it had been in the days of her childhood, and anything too painful remained far away, separated from her by a layer of time and opium.

Eleanor

My great-grandfather John C. Kolman died on Friday, December 19, 1919, of a heart attack. He died in the second-floor bedroom of his New York residence, at the top of a dark wood-paneled staircase.

On Thursday evening, he had gone down to the parlor and sat in the green easy chair in front of the fireplace, looking at his favorite painting, El Greco's
Saint Jerome.
It reminded him of his grandfather Solomon, whose liquor store had been his school. He started working there when he was just a child, then struck out on his own, went into the coal business, and by the age of thirty had made his first million.

Kolman was pleased with himself. Any feelings of guilt he had had been washed away by his daughter's death. Martha's suffering had redeemed him, but he must never forget it!

When Ellie was five, he gave her a locket with a picture of Martha and a ringlet of her golden hair. He made her wear it around her neck all the time, and checked often to make sure she had it on.

On Thursday evening, he sat on the sofa in the parlor, savoring his collection. The tableaux stood out clearly against the darkness, thanks to the ring of electrical lighting that he had had installed. It was expensive, but worth it. The oil paints came alive. If anyone had told him that tomorrow at this time he would be upstairs croaking in his bedroom, he would have laughed. His parents had lived to be over eighty, and he wasn't even seventy yet. He still had big plans.

Eleanor sat in the parlor with him, waiting patiently until he got tired and asked to be taken back to bed, where he had spent the last fortnight battling off a cold. He berated her in the elevator, and refused to take his medicine before he went to bed. Their bedrooms were next to each other, and John C. insisted that she
leave the door open. He would call out to her several times a night. There were moments when she grew tired of his moodiness.

When it came to business negotiations, John C. Kolman generally remained silent. His art supplier Duveen complained: A man could talk himself to death and still not know where he stood. Kolman would just listen quietly, with no telltale facial expression to give away what he was thinking. He would sit through several meetings that way before he decided to try out a painting or sculpture. He always took things on a trial basis, taking his time. He knew he could afford to. Duveen doted on him. But once Kolman was convinced of the merits of a purchase, he would dispense of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars with a wave of the hand.

John C. Kolman was a crafty man. Even as a youth, he understood the power of silence, leaving him with all the trumps, while his opponent voluntarily gave up his. It was part of his strategy to keep the enemy guessing. And everyone was his enemy.

Enemies could be bought, too.

For her fifteenth birthday, Eleanor got a diamond ring from him, which made her burst into tears, because it looked like an engagement ring. When she decided, eight years later, at the end of World War I, to go to Europe with the Red Cross, her father financed the field hospital where she worked, and on her return he held a celebration, pinning a medal for bravery on her: a brooch in the shape of an American eagle, encrusted with red rubies, blue sapphires, and diamonds.

When in the fall of 1919 he refused yet another request for her hand in marriage, he gave her a triple strand of pearls and took her on a trip to Egypt.

A messenger brought the pearls together with a huge bouquet
—
white roses with a tiny envelope tucked inside them: “Another offer of marriage today. I threw that nonsense straight in the trash. You're getting too popular! Hope you're thinking of me. J. C.”

She burst into tears. She had been sure the package, bouquet, and message were from someone else.

Normally, her father used monogrammed envelopes, but this one was solid white. Did he do it on purpose to deceive her? Would her daddy intentionally hurt her?

There are photos of John C. kissing little Ellie on the mouth and photos of her as an adult with her father's hand resting possessively on her knee.

Her father had even gone so far as to pay off her last suitor, a young doctor who refused to give Eleanor up. Kolman offered the doctor a sum too large to resist. He set up his own practice and married another girl. Eleanor thought it was strange that he disappeared so suddenly, without a word of explanation. But since she was young and had no experience with men, and since she was waiting for her first true love but had no idea what that would actually look like, she didn't bother to dig into what had happened to him.

Ever since she was little, her father had taken her to Europe. She took part in all his business ventures. He took her opinions seriously, and although he wouldn't send her to college (he wasn't in favor of public education for women), he enabled her to gain an exceptionally wide perspective. He appreciated her business acumen and regretted that she hadn't been born a boy.

Tom (my grandfather), in his opinion, was useless.