The Astor Orphan (3 page)

The barnyard—although a sad version of what it had once been—was still the heart of Rokeby, and Dad its pulse.

In the southeast corner of the barnyard stood a redbrick coach house designed by Stanford White. In the center was a U-shaped complex of white barns whose arms were still named according to their former purpose—the horse barn, the ox barn, the iceboat shed. Now the barns' siding was missing, roof tiles regularly blew to the ground, and doors hung off their hinges.

Just past the main barn complex stood a yellow farmhouse that, while badly in need of paint, was surrounded by a well-trimmed lawn littered with prickly Chinese chestnuts. This was where Sonny Day, Rokeby's seventy-year-old groundskeeper, lived. Sonny, who had worked at Rokeby since 1915, was one of the last human vestiges of the old farm days. These days, his duties were limited to mowing the lawns on an ancient riding mower and picking up the mail at a one-room post office down by the railroad tracks.

Dad called today's Rokeby “the funny farm.” Nowadays, he used the barnyard to fix or store various broken tractor engines and appliances. Junk of all descriptions littered the yard: tires, old vacuum cleaners, broken fans, furnaces, lawn furniture, discarded washing machines, car transmissions. These were either donations from Dad's friends or leftovers from Rokeby's rental houses—converted outbuildings like the old greenhouse, the old “gardener's cottage,” the creamery, and the “milk house”—whose tenants helped pay the property taxes.

“The hoe's gonna need some diesel. Hey, Roy!” Dad's voice searched among furnaces and mowers. “You here?”

“Yeah, Teddy! Over here!” A one-armed man with a scruffy black beard and a woolen cap now appeared from below the iceboat shed. “Just workin' on the bulldozer.” Roy lived out in our woods, in an old school bus, with his family.

“Can you give the hoe some diesel?”

Roy was one of the many people Dad took under his wing and whom he taught to fix things on no budget, or entertained with stories about his adventures behind the Iron Curtain in the sixties. Like so many of Dad's “mentees,” Roy had become an expert iceboater under Dad's tutelage.

One-armed Roy put fuel into the backhoe as I followed Dad into the horse barn. The stalls that had once been home to equine life now overflowed with detritus. As Dad poked around for some tools, I began picking up the garbage that cluttered the entrance and setting it aside in a pile.

“Wait just a minute! What are you doing with that?” Dad stopped me.

“Just throwing away garbage.”

“That stuff is useful. I'll go through it myself later.” Dad was a wall that stopped anyone from creating order in his barns.

Among these objects Dad hoped to find the essence of a Rokeby now lost. It was his dream to revive this essence, to return to the way things were when his pop was still alive.

My dream was to clean everything, so that it might one day look presentable to outsiders.

“Hey, Alexandra! Why don't you go out there and try to start up the backhoe?”

“Me? But, Dad, I'm only ten!”

“ 'S about time you learned to drive a backhoe. I did at your age.”

I couldn't say no. I had to prove to Dad that I was tough—a true farm girl. So I climbed into the seat. Its yellow stuffing poked out of the tears in its black plastic upholstery.

“Check that she's in neutral, now,” Dad commanded from the horse barn's cluttered doorway. He had no patience for stupidity, so I didn't ask him how I was supposed to check. I just sat there, slumped and waiting.

“Go ahead and take the stick in your hand, and see if it's loose,” he said in feigned exasperation at what he saw as my girlish tentativeness.

And I felt sorry that I wasn't a boy. I knew how much Dad had wanted a son—someone who could approximate his intimate relationship with Rokeby's land, buildings, and infrastructure when he was gone. As much as he let me tag along, I knew he would never see me as a proper heir.

The best I could do was to act like a boy so that Dad would teach me to sail an iceboat, weld, dig trenches with the backhoe, and drive a tractor.

I tried to move the stick shift. “It's not loose,” I reported.

“Step on the clutch, then move the stick into the middle, where it'll wiggle freely.”

I did as Dad instructed, excited to learn.

“Now keep your left foot on the clutch as you turn the key.”

The key was slightly bent and hard to turn in the ignition. When I finally turned it, nothing happened.

“Needs starter fluid.” Dad began scavenging amid the debris. He rolled a tire onto its side and some water gushed out of it. He kicked an empty oil can. Finally he found the starter fluid under a ripped blue tarp and sprayed something onto the uncovered engine that burned my lungs. I turned the key. As the backhoe roared to life, I felt a rush.

Just as Dad was about to show me how to put the machine into reverse, Grandma Claire's lemon-colored Plymouth sailed into the barnyard and stopped abruptly.

Grandma Claire opened the door and heaved her fragile body out of the low driver's seat. In her younger years, she had stood six feet tall, but now her back was badly hunched over. Her face was gaunt, her eyes sunk deeply into her skull. Her frizzy, once-black hair was now cut short and had long since turned salt and pepper. She stepped gingerly around the piles of metal in her red espadrilles.

One-armed Roy darted out of sight.

Grandma Claire lived down the hill, past the barnyard, in what had once been the chauffeur's garage. After Grandpa Dickie died in 1961, Grandma Claire had the garage converted to store her, instead of Great-Grandma Margaret's '39 Mercury. And, for us, her granddaughters, Grandma Claire was indeed the chauffeur's replacement. She drove us to music lessons, the public library, doctors' appointments, stores, and parties.

Grandma's skinny arms hung loosely from her torso, which was crunched up beneath the curve of her hunchback. She lifted them and waved at Dad, her son.

“Turn that thing off!” Her voice cracked with the desperation of a mother unable to control her child's errant behavior. “Who allows their child to drive heavy farm machinery?” Most of her
r
's disappeared into her old New England accent. Her father's family had been New Englanders, and Grandma had spent her first ten years on Boston's North Shore.

I shut off the engine. Since Grandma Claire paid all the bills, I felt obligated to listen to her.

“Teddy, I demand to know what's going on here!”

“We were just testing out the backhoe, in preparation for some possible digging.” Dad generally tried to disarm the fierce females in his life with meek acquiescence, though he was rarely successful.

The blood rose up Grandma Claire's neck like a rapid red tide. Her lips tightened, and she bared her large, once-glamorous teeth like a mad dog. “I suppose you think you're doing useful work here, do you? I suppose that digging up the place makes you feel better about not having a real job. . . .”

In true aristocratic fashion, Dad had never learned a profession. He had attended elite private schools, then Harvard and Johns Hopkins. After college, he traveled around Eastern Europe for six years, picking up five languages along the way. He had a gentleman's education, charm, and endless stories, but little professionalism.

The family viewed Dad's inability to conform to more middle-class norms as deliberate defiance, the mark of true failure, and the cause of all Rokeby's current troubles. But in fact, he was merely following tradition.

“Teddy! Alexandra!” From across the yard, Mom called down to us from our third-floor window in the big house. “
Obiad!
” Her words bent with her Polish accent as she invited us up for lunch—“
obiad
” in Polish.

Interrupted, Grandma Claire turned around and retreated to her car.

“I just don't understand it,” I could hear her mutter to herself as she walked. “It must be all my fault. We sent him to the best schools.”

Grandma had been brought up with the notion that a man must have a salaried career.

Unlike Rokeby's aristocratic Chanlers, the Cutlers—Grandma's family on her father's side—had been professional people. Her uncle Elliot Cutler had been a professor of medicine at Harvard and one of the first doctors in the United States to perform open-heart surgery. Another uncle had been chairman of the National Security Council under Eisenhower. Her father had been a senior partner at Smith Barney in New York City from the 1920s until his death in 1950.

I climbed down from my seat of near triumph.

“Coast's clear, Roy,” Dad shouted into the barnyard. “You can come out now. Come up to the big house if you want lunch.”

I was resentful of Dad's collection of freeloaders, mostly people of questionable character and sanity, to whom Dad gave more attention than he did to me.

Among the more memorable Rokeby hangers-on were “Bob the Ghost,” a schizophrenic; the cryptic, menacing Walter, who according to Dad had robbed graves in Mexico before moving in with us; and Victoria, a diminutive Hungarian lady with dead gray hair and silver teeth, who lived on our living room sofa for a whole year and cried continually into her kerchief for her beloved homeland, rubbed her gnarled hands, and winced from the excruciating pain of her arthritis.

Whenever I'd try to complain about them, Dad would give the same answer.

“My grandmother had boarders living in her house in New York. The idea was that if you had a big house, you should have people staying there. Did I ever tell you about the Palestinian gentleman from Haifa, whose father had been a planter? He lived on the third floor and would kiss my grandmother's hand whenever he saw her. He had some questionable job to do with Jews in Palestine. And the Major? . . . The Major would never kiss my grandmother's hand. . . .”

I tried to keep up with Dad's long strides as we walked up to the big house, passing the coach house, where his pop used to have his machine shop. The thick soles of Dad's construction boots clipped the driveway's hard dirt.

When he was a small kid, after the war, in '46 and '47, Dad used to come up from New York on weekends with his pop. They would work in the machine shop, where Grandpa Dickie would make parts for machines used on the farm—mostly tractors. He would use nineteenth-century equipment, like a lathe, shaper, grinder, and drill press. Dad told me that the shop used to be very dark, with fifteen-watt bulbs hanging from the ceiling. And it would get very noisy with the flapping of belts and the squeaking and grinding of machines. The building would shake with all the machinery running. These had been happy weekends for Dad.

Nowadays, Aunt Olivia kept her horses and goats there.

Courtesy of Ralph Gabriner

D
ad and I entered the forty-foot-long front hall. The ceiling was collapsing in some spots and stained with black mold in others. While spacious, the dark hall was suffocating.

Immediately to the left of the front door was a white marble plaque that read:
IN MEMORIAM, STANFORD WHITE, ARCHITECT AND FRIEND
. Beside it were two engravings. One was of General George Washington at the entrance of his tent, holding a copy of the Declaration of Independence. In the other, the Marquis de Lafayette stood before his troops after the Battle of Yorktown. Covering the opposite wall was a full-length tapestry depicting Pompey in the Roman Forum. Ribbed with age, it had been scratched and frayed by cats' claws at its bottom edges.

Our kitchen was buried in the center of the first floor, three stories below the rest of our apartment. Unless you went through the dining room to reach it, you had to pass through a dingy, windowless pantry that smelled of leftover cat food cans. Looming over everything was a cupboard where the green-and-gold-rimmed Astor china was stored, to be taken out and used only on rare, ceremonial occasions.

Mom had cleared a section of the long farm table so we could eat, shoving aside a clutter of books, newspapers, and Dad's various grease-stained to-do lists. Over the table hung a ribbon of brown flypaper still plastered with dead flies from the previous summer. The pine floorboards were dirty and almost bare of varnish where they'd been scraped over the years by the legs of our red metal kitchen chairs.

I would frequently look at Grandma Claire's Talbots catalogs, not for the conservative clothing, but for the furnished backgrounds—clean, carpeted floors; neatly set tables with vases full of fresh flowers. And I would try to imagine how different my life would be if my home looked like those furnished spaces. I might even invite school friends over to play.

Mom stood over a lentil-and-venison stew, which boiled on the stovetop. Her long brown hair was pulled up in a bun that had partially unraveled into wisps around her face. She had a distinctly Slavic beauty, marked by sadness and a seeming passivity. I looked exactly like her.