The Astor Orphan (11 page)

She stared blankly. “Oh, dear.” Her voice was hollow. She stumbled a few steps as she heaved herself up, as if the alcohol had tilted her brain.

“I'll just wait in the hall,” I said. From there I could hear her hiccup loudly, so I hummed the opening to the Vivaldi concerto to block out any more of her sounds.

As she made her way into the hallway, I noticed how her bony hands—crooked with arthritis—were shaking. Slouched way over, she leaned her spidery fingers, white with pressure, against the soot-darkened wall.

Grandma Claire's dry cough reeked of mouthwash. I knew that when she was like this, her driving was life-threatening.

Nevertheless, I preferred Grandma's drunk driving to Mom's expressions of maternal indifference. So I rushed Grandma Claire to the Plymouth. As she lowered herself into the front seat, she left her storklike legs and knobby arthritic knees outside. Then she pulled her legs in one by one—they were too long to fit comfortably—and squeezed them under the steering wheel.

“There, now.
All
ready.” She pulled down the sun flap to look in the mirror, put on her red lipstick, then pursed her lips with a smacking sound. She had smeared some over the top and bottom of her lip line and hadn't quite reached the edges of her mouth. But I guessed it made her feel presentable.

Since we took the farm road, we avoided Dad and Giselle, who might still have been with the Chevy on the front drive.

Once we were on the public road, with only minutes to spare, Grandma Claire drove at a snail's pace and braked as she approached each driveway along the way. As she weaved back and forth over the divider, I focused all my psychic energy on the gray pavement moving toward us, and my right hand grew white from squeezing the door handle.
Just stay right. Just stay right. Just stop at the stop sign
. Fortunately it was less than two miles to Mrs. Simmons's house, where both her piano students and Mrs. Gunning's violin students would be performing.

By the time we arrived at Mrs. Simmons's house, the violin students were sitting on the floor next to the glassed-in green room for plants and the piano students sat on the sofas against the wall, all ready to perform.

There was a balcony overlooking the open living room below, which had a black baby grand in its center. Grandma Claire stumbled up the stairs to join the parents seated on the balcony. They were peering over the railing, each one eager for his or her own child to perform. I attempted to ignore Grandma as she gesticulated, pointing out a spot on the floor where she thought I might take a seat.

“And now, we will hear . . . Alexandra,” Mrs. Simmons announced in her wispy, whispery voice. She clasped her hands together and smiled in my direction as I rose clumsily, trying not to step on someone's violin or bow.

Mrs. Gunning, my violin teacher, who doubled as an accompanist, was seated at the piano. She was short and slightly stooped yet nimble. She waited for me to set my sheet music on the stand, then played an A so I could tune.

Five years before, on a golden summer afternoon, Mrs. Gunning had ridden her horse across Cousin Chanler's estate and through the fields to Rokeby to ask if I would be interested in taking violin lessons. She had three students for her new Suzuki group and could use a fourth.

Now, I lifted the violin to my chin and nodded for Mrs. Gunning to begin the introduction to the first movement of the Vivaldi concerto. Within moments, I came in with a proud, unapologetic sound. I played with the passion of proving myself, each note clear and bright. I could not play softly, for fear of losing my audience's attention.

As I closed my eyes and imagined Mom sitting up in the balcony, listening with bated breath to my every note, I was suddenly distracted by an awareness of how people must see me. I felt exposed, as if all these people knew about Dad's crazy ways, Mom's depression, and Grandma's drinking. Were they all feeling sorry for me? Were they judging me? I could feel their heavy stares weighing on my hands, my arms, my back.

And for the first time during a performance, I lost my self-confidence. My teeth clenched, my left hand balled up, my chin rest jabbed into my neck, my bow hand trembled. My sound became squeezed, my bowing unsteady, my fingers slippery with cold sweat. In that moment, the whole terrible shame of my life at Rokeby seemed on display, and I began to worry that I would drop my violin.

After the recital, over refreshments, I could hear Grandma Claire—who obviously hadn't noticed the change in my tone and confidence during my performance—proudly responding to people's comments and questions. She could pass for sober now.

“Well, yes, I
am
very proud of my granddaughter. She certainly doesn't get it from me. . . . Oh, why I know she's talented! But what is it they say about genius? Ninety percent perspiration? My granddaughter is entirely self-motivated, you know. No one ever has to tell her to practice!

“You know, her great-grandfather, Richard Aldrich, was the music critic for the
New York Times
from 1902 to 1923. He was the closest musical relative.”

Everything proceeded as it always did. But a seed of something ugly had been planted.

Courtesy of the Margaret Livingston Aldrich Papers

Courtesy of the Margaret Livingston Aldrich Papers

W
ith the arrival of summer came the fun that was so lacking the rest of the year. It was the only season when the big house felt lived in, as cousins and family friends would come to stay.

Rokeby in the summertime was the ideal place for children, with its expansive lawns and many dusty and uninhabited rooms to poke around in. We'd have picnics by the river at Astor Point and take afternoon swims at our cousin's private pool.

M
O-OM, CAN WE
go swimming now?” Maggie and Diana begged Aunt Olivia.

“Ugh!” Aunt Olivia had learned to moan and groan like Grandma Claire. “Oh,
awll
-right. Just go wait in the car.”

“Yeah!” We all cheered, then poured like a flood out of the house, down the back steps, and into Aunt Olivia's black Jeep Wagoneer.

We rolled down all the windows, placed our towels on the hot vinyl seats to protect the backs of our thighs from burning, and left the doors open.

“Mo-om! Can you come
now
?” Maggie shouted up to the kitchen window.

“Awl-
right
! Just wait a minute, will you? . . . Damn children,” we heard her mutter.

We waited another fifteen minutes. I told Maggie to honk the horn. She honked.

“Awl-
right
!” Like a peeved hornet, Aunt Olivia shouted out the kitchen window. “If you're going to be so rude, we won't go!”

None of us believed her. We sat there for another five minutes, sweating and fanning ourselves with our hands.

“I'm going to die of heatstroke, damn it!”

“When are we going?”

I told Maggie to call her mother again. She called up.

Then Ben, Aunt Olivia's teenage son from her first marriage, who was just home from boarding school, ran down the back stairs. He was tall, wiry, and shirtless. His chest was concave, as if a meteor had landed there, or as if he were slowly imploding. Ben was the only boy at Rokeby.

“Oh, no! Ben's coming!”

“Ben, you can only come along if you don't play shark attack!” Maggie ordered.

“I'm scared of shark attack,” Diana whimpered.

Ben forced us to shove over in the backseat.

“It's too hot!”

“I feel sticky!”

Ben drilled Diana in the arm with his knuckle. She screamed, then cried.

Finally Aunt Olivia came, huffing and moaning, down the stairs. She had on a one-piece bathing suit with skinny shoulder straps, a frilly skirt printed with a jungle of vivid flowers, and a sun visor. She was carrying a canvas bag on her shoulder.

“Okay. Is everybody ready?”

“We've been ready for an hour!” Maggie rolled her eyes.

“Don't you be fresh with me, young lady! Why's Diana crying?”

“Ben punched her for no reason at all!” Maggie tattled.

“Ugh . . . ,” Aunt Olivia moaned as she heaved herself into the driver's seat.

Once we reached the neighboring estate, Aunt Olivia let us ride the rest of the way on the open tailgate.

This had been the estate of Great-Grandma Margaret's sister Aunt Elizabeth Chapman, subject of the famous John Singer Sargent portrait. Aunt Elizabeth had married John Jay Chapman, the famous man of letters who was descended from John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States and one of the nation's founding fathers.

Whenever the question of mental illness in the family arose it was the Chapmans who came to mind. John Jay Chapman was subject to frequent bouts of both serious depression and irrational, impulsive behavior.

Aunt Elizabeth and John Jay Chapman's son, Chanler Chapman, who now lived on his mother's estate, was also known to have episodes. Once he was arrested and placed in an asylum for shooting up a local tavern. And on the morning after his mother's death, he reportedly came over to Rokeby with a shotgun to see his aunt Margaret. He found Great-Grandma Margaret having breakfast in bed, and, without explanation, aimed the gun right at her. At this, she nonchalantly continued chewing; smiled her squinty, condescending smile; and calmly pushed aside the barrel of his gun.

C
OUSIN CHANLER CHAPMAN'S
pool was a rectangle of blue in a lonely, prickly brown field, and he sat beside it in a portable lawn chair, Jamaican home attendant at his side. He was an eighty-year-old Scottish terrier of a man, with fuzzy salt-and-pepper hair and bristly whiskers. A Polaroid camera hung on a string against his sparse gray chest hair, as he was always hoping to catch some shots for his private gazette, the
Barrytown Explorer
.

Cousin Chanler had started the
Barrytown Explorer
, a newspaper substantially about himself, in 1948. It mainly chronicled his thoughts and deeds but occasionally featured articles about people in the local community. As Cousin Chanler's newspaper was paid for exclusively with his own private funds, he could afford to write whatever he wished. And this had been his general philosophy of life: to say, write, and do anything he damn well pleased.

Like Dad, Cousin Chanler had created his own universe. Yet as he had been the sole heir of Aunt Elizabeth's estate, he had no vigilant co-owners to thwart his autonomy.

Our posse now approached like a wolf pack in our beautiful bathing suits—mine was white with green leaves interspersed with stunningly red ladybugs—our towels over our shoulders, threatening to create a ruckus of splashing and screaming.

Since he'd become old and infirm, Cousin Chanler had been living in the red ranch house on his estate, while his mother's mansion remained uninhabited. Only once, before he moved out of it, had I seen the mansion's four square rooms on the ground floor, with their handsome French doors; twenty-foot-high ceilings; gigantic, threadbare Oriental rugs; and ornate marble mantelpieces. While it was small in comparison to Rokeby, it was cozier.

Cousin Chanler now started to pull himself up on his walker to properly greet our posse. We were frequently reminded to be polite or we wouldn't be allowed to come swim there anymore. During our patient ritual of shaking hands and repeating our names, he grunted approval with a wet streak of drool in the crack of each corner of his mouth. By the time we had thrown down our towels and were running for the water like animals fleeing a forest fire, he had the boxy camera pressed against his focused journalist's eye.

Within minutes, we were all screaming in terror of the “shark” in the pool. Ben's idea of fun was to swim under us, grab us by the legs, and pull us down. We screamed, swallowed the chlorinated water, and struggled to the surface to catch our breath, panicked as much by our unfazed chaperones as by Ben's strong hands.