The Astor Orphan (2 page)

Evidence of the orphans' exploits surrounds us and offers us a standard to live by.

Today the Astor money, which has supported generations of aristocrats ill equipped to earn or invest, is gone. While that undisciplined, orphaned spirit still abounds, it is depressed by the house's sterile air of preservation. Aside from its continuous deterioration, the house has changed little since Great-Grandma Margaret's death in 1963.

To keep the house as it was then, we sacrifice any resources that might have been invested in current generations. In return, the house gives each of us—the impoverished descendants—an identity. And we live off the remains of our ancestral grandeur.

Courtesy of
Town & Country
magazine

T
affeta rustled and crackled as my little cousin Diana ran, dragging Great-Grandma Margaret's black gown across the drawing room's radiant orange Oriental rug. My cousins and I had slipped from the mansion's servants' quarters into its formal front rooms—usually reserved for tours and parties—in order to practice for a play.

Beethoven rippled from my violin and over the room: lamps shaped like elaborate candelabras, folds of torn wallpaper, peeling paint, tattered lampshades, and warmly lit mirrors that towered over the room's two gray marble mantelpieces.

As the provider of background music, I was not dressed in a gown.

This, the drawing room, was the largest room in the house, a continent unto itself, with two Steinway grands—black and brown, one for each of my musical great-grandparents. The pianos slept, cheek to jowl, at one end of the room. At the other stood a gilt table with a bare-breasted cherub astride each of its front legs. The rest of the room was uncluttered, waiting for an audience to convene for a recital on the several armchairs upholstered in lime-green silk.

Diana was carrying some dolls from my extensive collection. Her short, dirty-blond hair had been chopped unevenly in a self-inflicted haircut. In one arm, she held my Jenny doll—a two-foot-tall, soft-torsoed toddler whose beige plastic folds of chubby flesh collected at her knees and elbows and whose eyelids rolled open and closed with a little clicking sound as she turned. In the other arm, she held both Eva, a wooden Polish doll with an itchy red woolen skirt and two ruddy brown braids, and the Russian soldier doll with a coarse olive army uniform and crumbling plaster face.

Maggie lay on a sofa with a torn floral slipcover, dressed in a gown of robin's-egg blue and inhabiting the role of our great-great-grandmother Maddie Chanler. Her eyes were closed and her arm was draped dramatically across her forehead.

“Come see your Mama Maddie now,” Diana, in the role of Cousin Mary, said to the babies in her arms. She then placed them gently around Maggie.

“Thank you, Cousin Mary,” Maggie said to her sister. Then she turned to her babies. “Your mama is dying. She has ammonia.”

“It's
pneu
-monia,” I called out over the music. We all knew the story from Maggie and Diana's father, who lectured historical societies as they toured the house.

“You see? I'm dying, and she's still correcting me!” Maggie momentarily lost her composure, then resettled into character. “Rokeby has always taken care of its orphans. My mother . . . What was my mother's name again?”

“Emily Astor,” I called out over the decrescendo as a chip of ceiling paint fell onto the piano.

“My own mother, Emily Astor, died when I was just two years old. And my grandparents . . .” She paused.

“The William B. Astors,” I called over the trill.

“. . . raised me here at Rokeby as their own daughter.”

Diana bit her lip as she fished for the next line, then blurted out, “And they banished that vile father of yours!” Diana was playing Mary Marshall, a cousin who became the orphans' primary guardian. “Sam Ward! His name should not even be spoken in this house!”

“But what did my daddy do?” asked a languishing Maggie.

“He was a bohemian spendthrift!”

Hanging like an idol on our drawing room wall, a youthful Great-Grandma Margaret—one of the youngest of these bereft babies—looked on from her gilt frame. She was seated on the front porch in a raven-black gown, poised and self-righteous with her back ramrod straight and her thin, elegant hands resting on her full, bombazine-coated lap. It was the same gown Diana now wore.

G
REAT-GRANDMA MARGARET WAS
Rokeby's ancestral guard of order. In reaction to her undisciplined and tragic Rokeby childhood, she had developed rigid rules and unyielding opinions. As an adult, she never varied from her schedule of reading, meals, and visiting hours at teatime. These had been the pillars of sense and sanity for her, if not for her relatives, who had simply kept their distance—some by choice and others by force.

As the sole owner of Rokeby, Great-Grandma Margaret had had the power to banish any disorderly elements, namely family members who defied her standards and expectations. For her, the greatest threats to the family's respectability were divorce and religious conversion. Her fanatically strict principles superseded any emotional ties with even the closest of family members.

Among the banished were her favorite brother, Lewis (divorced), and her own daughter, Maddie (also divorced), as well as her sister Alida, who had chosen to become Catholic.

I
N MY MIND
, I, too, was a guard of order, perpetuating the family's image of class and refinement with my violin playing and outstanding academic record.

“Maggie, that dress should not be so tight fitting on you,” I prompted as the girls gathered up the dolls after rehearsal. “You don't see anyone overweight in the portraits, do you?”

“I'm telling my mommy you called me fat!” She stamped her foot and stalked away. Maggie always went over my head to those with the real power.

I often wished we were orphans, with enough inherited money to live on. But money was the only thing we hadn't inherited.

I now picked up my violin and began to play again, this time loudly, just for the pleasure of hearing my own sound resonate through the massive room.

When I played my violin, there was no past, present, or future. The sense that we lived on the brink of disaster was suspended, as was the sickening feeling that there was nowhere else in the world we could possibly belong. When I played, all that existed for me was the firmness of my bow's horsetail hairs as they glided and bounced on the steel strings; my left hand gently cupping the violin's smooth wooden neck and rocking, sometimes slowly and other times intensely, with vibrato; my thumb sliding up and down the neck as my hand changed positions; the piney smell of rosin powder as it floated off the dancing bow hairs; the deep, low notes, so solid and strong, and the high notes, vulnerable and brave; my fingers curling over the fingerboard as their callused tips pressed down and released with each note. How I admired the agility and obedience of those happy fingers!

“Olivia!”

Uncle Harry's voice woke me from my trance. Uncle Harry was Maggie and Diana's father; Olivia was their mother. He stood now on the western lawn, just outside the French doors, dressed in his usual suit and tie. His straight hair was smooth, oiled and brushed over to the side, and he wore round, steel-rimmed glasses.

Behind Uncle Harry rose a pillar of smoke from the front field. This was Dad—Uncle Harry's older brother—on the tractor, doing the spring mowing. Playtime was over. I had to prevent Dad and Uncle Harry from intersecting.

Each brother had taken on a secondary identity to supplement his endangered aristocratic one. Uncle Harry had adjusted well to the present, taking on a job as a civil servant in Albany. Dad remained at Rokeby full-time, in the dual roles of landlord and unpaid handyman.

As different as they were, each in his own way identified strongly with his aristocratic roots, and they shared a passion for keeping Rokeby's glory alive.

I now rushed to put my violin back in its case, which I had left in the octagonal library. As the shutters were kept closed to protect the books from daylight, it was dark—an effect intensified by its
faux bois
walls and ceiling. The walls were lined with approximately four thousand deteriorating, leather-bound books, and from the ceiling dropped an ominous hook, initially meant for a large chandelier. Stagnant because it was never aired out, the library harbored winter's chill all year long.

Diana was there, and I handed her my violin case as I ran off to join Dad on the tractor fender. On my way through the hall, I eyed the cobwebs that clustered around the legs of tables and chairs, the clumps of dried mud and cat hair scattered on the parquet floor, and the filthy white steps. All called me to dust, sweep, and wash them.

But the pull to Dad was stronger.

Courtesy of Ania Aldrich

I
raced out the double front doors, across the dusty circular driveway, and down the grassy hill toward Dad.

“Dad!” I shouted. But he couldn't hear me over the roar of the tractor engine and mower blades.

I was always on the lookout for Dad. I would scurry after him like a desperate pet, taking three steps for every one of his. “Wait up, Dad!” I'd cry as I followed him on his daily rounds of the property—digging trenches and laying new water, waste, or electric lines; doing mechanical work on one of the farm's tractors; or nailing new shingles onto a barn roof.

“You gotta keep up,” he'd say, without turning around or adjusting his pace.

Dad was always chasing his own father—“Pop” to him, “Grandpa Dickie” to me. In Rokeby's soil and barns, on the iceboats, along the electric and water lines, lay his early childhood memories of time spent with his father. Mowing, riding, fixing—these were pursuits they'd shared before the liquor had swept Grandpa Dickie into permanent oblivion, then premature death. Dad would wake up at five, and then, over breakfast, write lists of things that needed to be done on the property. He never seemed to tire of it.

When I finally caught up with the tractor, Dad slowed down for me. I hopped on, hoping to keep him from driving up to the big house and running into his brother. Such confrontations usually resulted in Dad's being severely scolded by Uncle Harry for some activity he had undertaken at Rokeby without consulting his co-owner.

“Do you have any other work to do?” I shouted over the roar of the tractor engine.

“Trench—lower barn,” he shouted back.

Dad's wiry hair was matted. His face and hands were smeared with grease and his face powdered with dust. The name tag on his used, blue work shirt read
HANK
. His gray eyes looked kind and wise.

I loved riding on the tractor fender like this, losing track of time in the vast greenness, grass seeds flying around our heads and scratchy bits of hay getting into our noses and eyes. As we drove, I watched a family of turkeys wobble past the rusted Rokeby windmill.

T
HE ASTOR ORPHANS'
fancy New York relatives—especially their great-aunt Caroline Astor,
the
Mrs. Astor, the famous socialite—had viewed their country cousins as unrefined and had made extensive efforts to transform them into urban sophisticates, fit for high society. But the city Astors could not take the country toughness out of Great-Grandma Margaret.

As a young woman—long before she married the esteemed music critic Richard Aldrich—Great-Grandma Margaret significantly expanded the farm at Rokeby. When, in 1900, she inherited money from her great-aunt Laura (Astor) Delano, she used it to add three large barns to the Rokeby barnyard and purchase approximately fifty cattle, establishing a large-scale dairy farm, which she ran until her death more than sixty years later.

Dad parked the tractor on the farm road at the edge of the barnyard and approached the yellow backhoe that he'd use to dig the trench by the lower barn. It stood next to a lonely fuel pump in the cluttered yard, its long hoe curled up behind it like a tail.