Unto the Sons (69 page)

It was his younger brother, Richard, who inherited the height of his forebears, and even added to it; but everything else behind Richard’s appearance and achievements in later years remained largely a mystery. What was the source of his scholastic brilliance, his mercenary zeal, his unswerving optimism, his scientific inventiveness, his conquering spirit? No less interesting was the origin of his passion for opera and poetry (he claimed he could recite every line written by Byron, trying to keep in practice often to the tedium of his sons); to say nothing of the fact that while in medical school he taught himself not only to read and write German, but to speak a refined
Hochdeutsch
so naturally, and without grammatical errors or dialectal detractions, that it astonished his aristocratic doctor friends at Cologne University even more than his regaling them (while sailing past the cliff of Lorelei on the Rhine) with Heinrich Heine’s lyrical lines to the nymph:
Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten, / Dass ich so traurig bin
.

Dr. Mattison’s first wife, Esther (the daughter of a retired British career officer whom the doctor met at her home in Cranbury, New Jersey, through an introduction by his college classmate and colleague from Morristown, Henry G. Keasbey), was one of the rare individuals who could perceive the great length of his upward spiral, since he permitted her to accompany him during his infrequent visits back to where he had been born and reared. The most memorable, if not the first such occasion
in Bucks County, was on February 12, 1885 (a date she noted well in her diary), for this marked his brother’s elevation to domesticity: At the age of thirty-seven, Asher was finally getting married. And while the groom did not wear socks for the occasion (although no one could tell, for he wore one of the doctor’s old suits, which was long in the cuff), Asher did appear at the Friends’ ceremony in Solebury Township wearing, in addition to a borrowed bow tie and shirt, a new pair of shoes. Asher’s bride was a neighboring farm lady named Hulda Pearson, who was close to his own age, and who would bear no children; but she was tidy and cheerful, and self-possessed, too, in the way she entertained the guests as a folk dance soloist after the ceremony, and accepted the applause with gratitude but hardly a semblance of modesty. She seemed to agree that she was good.

At this time the doctor and Esther had been married about ten years; the Keasbey & Mattison plant in Ambler was beginning to prosper; and the couple had just moved into the multitowered Victorian mansion that the doctor had not yet thought of reconstructing into a Gothic castle. The doctor had recently marked his thirty-third birthday, but because of his size and stalwart manner, his walrus moustache and thick peppery-colored beard (which he had begun growing a few years before to hide the jaw scars incurred during his nighttime tumble down a trap door while snooping around a pharmaceutical competitor’s plant in Philadelphia), he appeared to be much older than he was, and certainly more patriarchal than the multitude of elders in the room, including especially the smallish, wizened Pownall-related octogenarians who were gathered in one corner standing with the aid of their canes. Also there was the doctor’s seventy-two-year-old father, Joseph, who had boasted to Esther before the ceremony that he was wearing the same shiny black suit he had worn some forty years before, when he had journeyed to Flemington to marry Mahala, and he was almost right when he claimed that the old suit still fit him perfectly. There was a sense of merriment about Joseph Mattison that seemed totally absent in his son Asher, who, posing with the bride in a semblance of a receiving line, seemed as cheerful as a man doomed to the gallows. Asher’s sixty-six-year-old mother looked only slightly less grim. Mahala was stocky and square-jawed, with a crown of closely cropped black hair hanging down as straight and thick as the bristles of a paintbrush, and the only sign of emotion she communicated during the entire outing, as far as Esther could see, was a slight tightening of her lips when Asher’s bride did her folk dance. This was apparently unseemly behavior for a Quaker, even though Hulda was not a practicing Quaker.

Nor was the doctor, having become an active Episcopalian even before
meeting Esther. But he seemed quite comfortable among the Friends at the community center in Bucks County, moving easily among all the wedding guests as he made polite inquiries about their personal welfare and the economic conditions of their properties; and finally, when he heard the sounds of hoofbeats and bells coming from the path in front of the building, he invited everyone to join him outside for the presentation of his gift to Asher and his new bride. It was an elegant English carriage trimmed with floral wreaths and pulled by four high-stepping caparisoned horses. After a short speech, in which he wished the couple the best in health and happiness, the doctor insisted on serving as their coachman as they sat in the vehicle and were driven down the path to the main road and back again, while the other guests stood watching and applauding from the lawn. Esther had never before seen her husband holding the reins behind a team of horses, and she was again impressed by how comfortable he seemed in this rural setting. Nearby she noticed her mother-in-law watching her; Mahala said nothing but nonetheless made her feel like a tourist from a faraway place who had strayed in to watch some quaint rustic sideshow.

The wedding guest whom Esther liked most was her husband’s spinster aunt, Martha Mattison, who was now seventy-four and
still
occupied the largest bedroom in the old house she shared with Mahala and Joseph. Martha was high-strung and verbose, and a malicious gossip especially in matters regarding Mahala; but unlike Mahala, she could read and write—a fact that Martha was not wont to keep secret—and she also possessed in her bedroom a stack of illustrated Gothic fairy tales and poetry books that she said she used to read to young Richard when he was growing up. Esther saw some of these books when they stopped briefly at the doctor’s boyhood home after the wedding; while the doctor toured the farmland with his parents and his two children, Esther spent time alone with Martha and sensed that she had undoubtedly been part of the reason why young Richard had developed along different lines from Asher.

Martha Mattison had apparently been a second mother to Richard, his literate mother who not only read to him but encouraged him in believing that he had a destiny to fulfill in places far from the farm. Martha was the oldest daughter of that big barefoot fantasist, Richard Mattison or Mathieson, who, while he might have been eight-tenths malarkey, had nonetheless stimulated her imagination to a degree that captivated young Richard, who would later try to transform family myths into reality. On some of his grade school books, which his aunt Martha had kept, Esther could see his boyhood drawings of castles in the margins of the pages, and
his listing of his classmates’ names with noble titles, and the ostentatious Gothic lettering he used in printing on the back of one book the name of the former farm boy who was then serving as president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Some of the family folklore that Martha recalled hearing from her father was familiar to Esther—who had heard her husband, the doctor, essentially repeat it in bedtime stories to
their
son, Richard Jr.—tales of a noble family who lived in a castle by a great lake in Scotland called Loch Alsh, which as Esther realized was what the doctor had named the deepest lake on their estate in Ambler.

On their way home from the wedding, the doctor pointed out to Esther the small stone building where he had first attended school. It was two miles from the farm and was now surrounded by weeds. He told her that Asher had attended the same school but had dropped out after two years. The doctor remained there to complete the six-year course, leading his class academically, as he always would at the country high school. His aunt Martha had mentioned the special interest that a certain teacher had taken in him, and, with some financial help from an affluent Quaker pharmacist in the town of New Hope, the teacher had facilitated Richard’s entry into the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy in 1872, where there were Quakers on the faculty and the board of trustees. Richard graduated from there with top honors, as he subsequently did as a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania. Befriending his classmate, the wealthy Keasbey, had been essential to launching their pharmaceutical firm; but it was Dr. Mattison who had made the business successful.

The doctor was an energetic entrepreneur as well as an exploring scientist. He was a doer as much as a dreamer. He was, in Esther’s opinion, most likely a genius. And in believing this, she found it unnecessary to understand rationally every aspect of his ascendancy from rusticity to majestic pretensions. If that was how the doctor wished to live in this free country, then he had earned the prerogative to do so. Her role was not to regulate him, as her soldierly English father had tried to regulate her, all but forbidding her courtship with the then dirt-poor pharmacy student; her role as his wife was to encourage him, as his aunt Martha had done. And so Esther did not take issue with the doctor when their marital life in later years became excessively sumptuous and unreal. She did not question him when he ordered a castlelike façade to cover the surface of their mansion; or when he insisted on naming their second son Royal; or when he spent a fortune in Munich to have three castle gates designed and forged by some of the costliest artisans in Europe. The walls around his estate also were made higher at this time, for the doctor complained of
needing more privacy. His business empire was growing, there were more demands on his time, and every day people were arriving unannounced at the castle seeking alms, or loans, or dispensation from their debts. He was not only the chief operating officer of the asbestos firm but also the landlord of four hundred domiciles, the sole provider of all their coal, water, and steam; he was the director of the First National Bank of Ambler, the president of the Philadelphia Drug Exchange, and a board member of several companies around the nation and overseas. There were times when he simply did not want to see
anybody
, and his orders were strictly enforced by the guards posted behind the gates with their sidearms and mastiffs.

Late on a summer Sunday afternoon, while the doctor and Mrs. Mattison were having tea on the veranda with two important Canadian mining officials and their wives, Mrs. Mattison heard the dogs barking in the distance more persistently than usual, and minutes later she overheard the conversation of a guard in the pantry reporting to the butler that there was an angry man at the gates who stubbornly refused to leave until he had met face to face with Dr. Mattison.

“It’s a barefoot fellow with some woman in a dirty old carriage,” Mrs. Mattison overheard the guard telling the butler. “And this fellow claims he’s the doctor’s brother!”

The superintendent, Devine, was then in a remote part of the estate, overseeing the repairs being done on the drainage system at Loch Alsh, which had overflowed during a rainstorm; and an inexperienced guard, who was filling in this weekend, had taken the liberty of coming directly to the castle rather than taking the trouble to track down Devine. It had been many years since Mrs. Mattison had seen Asher and Hulda; decades had passed since their wedding, and Mrs. Mattison had revisited the farm only to attend funerals—the first for the doctor’s father; the next for his mother; and finally for his maiden aunt Martha, who died peacefully in her sleep in the largest bedroom in the farmhouse. During these brief visits the doctor had seemed less cordial to Asher than before, possibly because the latter was planting unproductively and was neglecting the upkeep of the property, including the once elegant carriage that had been the couple’s wedding gift. Esther had discovered that Asher had sawed off the roof to make it into an open vehicle, and he seemed to be using it more for hauling dirt and wood than for the purpose for which it was designed and constructed.

Now as the butler stepped out onto the veranda, carrying a silver tray with a note that was intended for her eyes only, Mrs. Mattison looked
across the table toward her husband. Although he continued conversing with their guests, she could tell he was distracted. He, too, had overheard the guard. She was sure of it from the ashen tone that had just come into his face, and from the panic she saw in his eyes during the single second she had gotten his attention; and his wishes regarding this situation seemed very clear to her.

“The doctor and I do not wish to be disturbed by
anyone
,” Mrs. Mattison said to the butler standing at her side, and she waved away the note without reading it. The doctor paused in his conversation, nodded, then redirected his attention to the guests.

“The individual is
quite
insistent,” the butler added, before turning to leave.

“Well,” Mrs. Mattison said, as politely as she could, “tell the guard to be even
more
insistent.”

Asher and Hulda Mattison were soon confronted by four guards and their dogs; and although Asher’s profanity could be heard high above the barking, he finally did back the coach out onto the main road and become resigned to the fact that he would not be paying the doctor a Sunday visit. Hulda, in her quiet way, was more enraged than her husband. She had just purchased a red taffeta cape for the occasion, and midway during their journey back to the farm another rainstorm descended upon the region. The dye in Hulda’s new cape soon drained out of the fabric, covering her dress and her arms with red splotches and streaks.

When she returned home, she hung it to dry, but it was forever ruined. Still, she kept the cape throughout the rest of her life (she would die in 1935), and hung it above the mantel, a red flag that would always remind her of the day when she had been turned away by the doctor, a man to whom she would never speak again, or allow to reenter the home in which he had been born.

34.

T
he doctor’s second wife, the crippled Mary Mattison, who since her auto accident viewed the entire world primarily through binoculars, had never been aware of seeing any Italians in her entire life until she married the doctor in 1920 and moved from Princeton to Ambler; now,
however, she saw almost nothing
but
Italians every time she looked down from her turret window, and often she wished she could change the scenery.