The Astor Orphan (6 page)

Hanging on my bedroom wall was my daily schedule, which I checked religiously. I'd written it for myself when I was seven. It read:

I hoped that this list might someday serve as evidence to future generations of my disciplined, serious character.

I often took out my old math tests and English essays. All A's, high nineties or one hundreds. I ran my fingers over the gold stars stuck on the top of each page and savored Mrs. Keaton's comments: “Excellent” and “Outstanding!”

Everything about Mrs. Keaton, my fifth-grade teacher, was straight and square. She seemed to have a metal pole for a backbone. Both rows of teeth between her canines were in a perfectly straight line, making her jaw seem clenched. She would march her class through the school halls in her square-heeled shoes like a general leading a children's crusade. Mrs. Keaton adored me, as I did everything exactly as she demanded. And I adored her, as she was the only authority figure in my life who was both powerful and fair.

Still smarting from my “conference” with Aunt Olivia, I picked up my violin and began to play madly, as loudly as I could. I wanted my aunt to hear how well I played. I wanted her to know about my gold stars. I would force on her my best self, which she could not seem to see.

My eyes rested on my dolls, displayed in a long row on an antique daybed by the window. But instead of my usual nurturing feeling, I felt nothing for these, my babies. My mind was already leaving them, scrambling furiously into the future.

As I played on, I imagined myself onstage, a famous performer in front of thousands, with an orchestra behind me. Fame meant recognition. Perhaps fame could rescue me from the confusion and shame of Rokeby.

One day—after I'd gone to Juilliard and become rich and famous—I'd return to Rokeby in a black limousine. All of the inhabitants of the big house would rush out to greet me and kiss my hands in gratitude for having donated millions of dollars to Rokeby's restoration. The barnyard would be clean, the front rooms scrubbed by a paid housemaid, the storerooms converted into private rooms my parents could call their own, and the archives—our joint heritage—organized and available for all to share.

© by China Jorrin

Courtesy of Ania Aldrich

R
okeby had been passed down through the female line for generations. John Armstrong Jr. built the big house on his wife's Livingston land. After marrying the Armstrongs' daughter, William B. Astor likewise moved to Rokeby. The Astors' granddaughter Maddie Ward Chanler inherited Rokeby, and eventually her daughter, my great-grandma Margaret, became Rokeby's sole owner.

Grandma Claire, who married Great-Grandma Margaret's son, was the family's current matriarch.

It was Sunday morning. As I entered Grandma Claire's house through the kitchen, I stepped over cracked linoleum and shivered with disgust at the layer of hardened white grease in the cast-iron frying pan and the mouse droppings sprinkled about.

Grandma had never learned how to keep house. Despite the fact that she entertained frequently, her house was always messy. Books—some from the library and others from her own musty shelves—were piled on the reading table beside her recliner. Though wooden chairs lay on the sofas to protect them from white dog hairs, hair littered the floor and the ragged Oriental rug in front of the fireplace.

Grandma's father had made a fortune as a senior partner at Smith Barney in the 1920s. Before his money had been swept away in the Great Depression, Grandma had been ashamed of her family's extravagant wealth. As a schoolgirl, she would ask her father's chauffeur to drop her off a block away from her school, embarrassed to be seen by the other girls waiting out in the schoolyard. For her, the extravagance of her father's Rolls-Royce—gleaming, self-important, chauffeur driven—had clashed with her own humility; she was tentative and withdrawn.

This was why Grandma—who lived off the interest from some mysterious surviving trust—never hired help, except when she paid her granddaughters to help out at dinner parties.

“Good morning, dear.” Grandma Claire was seated at her dining table in her maroon felt bathrobe, reading the Sunday
Times
. “Can I get you some breakfast?”

Grandma's house smelled of musty antiques. It was full of simple, elegant objects: silver ashtrays; glass candlesticks; watercolors of Florence, her favorite city; and a lazy Susan in the middle of her oval oak dining table that held quaint ceramic butter dishes and salt and pepper shakers. There were blue and white Dutch tiles around the fireplace. The gilt mirrors were dim, and the Oriental rugs tattered. Her bookshelves were lined with political biographies and illustrated animal books. Her living room cupboard was full of old parlor games, like backgammon, Scrabble, and Anagrams, all with crumbling boards and missing or cracked pieces.

The long living room was lined with French doors that opened onto a backyard. The dining table was at the east end of the giant room, and sofas were arranged around the fireplace at its west end.

“Are you coming to church with me?” Grandma asked. I usually went to church with Grandma. Occasionally Maggie and Diana would join us, but more often they would go with their mother.

Very rarely, Mom would come to church. She had technically converted to Episcopalianism from Catholicism when she married Dad, although she was really what Dad called a “pagan.” She practiced rites like dancing around bonfires on the summer solstice and burning candles for the “spirits.”

Dad always claimed to be a devout Episcopalian. When asked about his religious beliefs, he'd say, “They're listed in the back of the Anglican prayer book.” But I only ever saw Dad in church on Christmas Eve.

In religious matters, Uncle Harry's loyalty remained with Christ Church in the village, the construction of which had been funded by William B. Astor in the 1850s, because he and his wife wished to attend Anglican services. The Astor orphans had likewise worshiped at Christ Church every Sunday.

Grandma had asserted her independence by choosing a different church: St. John the Evangelist, a quaint bluish-gray Carpenter Gothic with a matching rectory that was just a mile up the road.

At church, we knew all the regular congregants and were related to several. This positive social interaction enticed me to attend regularly.

A second enticement was Sunday-morning breakfast with Grandma Claire, which was a welcome relief from the hard black bread of home. She would serve me sliced grapefruit, and buttered toast, and eggs that she would cook sunny-side up, special for me.

Breakfast done, I'd accompany Grandma Claire to her room to help her get ready for church.

Grandma and I would dress up, transforming ourselves into unquestionable respectability, she in her black dress suit and I in one of the kilts she'd bought that made me look like a small Talbots model.

Clothes were draped over the footboard of Grandma Claire's bed, and unmatched slippers and shoes were scattered underneath. As she was constantly writing letters and giving gifts, her two dressers were piled with envelopes, books of stamps, stationery boxes, and rolls of wrapping paper and scissors.

Grandma Claire now half sat, half lay on her bed to get into her stockings. Chronically overwhelmed and disorganized, she would coax herself through the steps of any task.

“Ughh! Oh dear me! All right now. Right foot's in.” She managed to get her right stocking on without tearing it on her curling yellow toenails. “Ugh!” She pulled it high and snapped it to her girdle:
Click
. “There! Now, that's
much
better!”

When she'd snapped both stockings on, she buttoned herself into her inherited, threadbare Lord and Taylor suit, which didn't quite fit her tall, stooped, emaciated body. The jacket's sleeves weren't long enough and left her skinny wrists and hands, slightly twisted with arthritis, to jut out like the front feet of a mole.

Then the search for the shoes began. She bent over to peer under the bed and rummaged through her musty closet. “Ugh! I only see one black loafer.
Who
on earth could have taken my other loafer? Ughh!” Then, “Oh I really
am
a dunce. How
could
I have misplaced my glasses?”

“They're hanging around your neck, Grandma.”

“Oh, for goodness' sake! . . .
Where is my pocketbook?
I just
can't
go anywhere without my pocketbook! I'll give you ten dollars if you can find it.”

Things went on in this way until we got into the lemon-yellow Plymouth and went floating along Rokeby's dusty farm road as I stared out at the open fields.

M
Y REVERIE WAS
broken by a noisy red Fiat bumbling toward us, undaunted by the driveway's potholes. Grandma Claire began pumping her foot, madly alternating between the gas and the brake, jolting the car back and forth. I thought I could hear her teeth grinding and the short, snorting breaths from her nose, building like a dragon's internal bellows. When the Fiat reached us, Grandma Claire came to a complete stop and rolled open her window with uncharacteristic speed.

The red car stopped obediently alongside us, like a child caught in the middle of an exciting game of tag. The female driver cheerfully rolled down her window to greet us.

“
Bonjour
, Madame Claire,
comment ça va
?” Her girlish voice rang like a soft bell. A bit of perfume wafted from her direction, and the gold bangles she wore clinked against the steering wheel. Like me, she had a gap between her front teeth.

A roar welled up from deep inside Grandma Claire, and, like lightning, she slammed her car door several times against the red body of the Fiat:

Once!
“You French harlot!” Grandma Claire's sixty-six-year-old voice shrieked over the din of colliding metal.

Twice!
“Get off my property!”

Three times!
“I'll smash you!”

Four times!
“Get back to France!”

The red car pulled away before the fifth blow. Grandma Claire now had one leg out of the Plymouth and was shaking her fist, still screaming.

Grandma's violent reactions to Dad's friends and general way of life were a testament to how desperately she cared, how desperately she hoped to set Dad straight. The company he kept reminded her painfully of her failure to raise him into a model member of the class into which he'd been born.

“What did she do, Grandma?” I asked.

“Oh . . . well . . .” She seemed disoriented now, her anger suddenly gone. “She's a
fallen woman
—married with three daughters—and a
homewrecker
.”

The only wrecks I had known of until now were the junked cars Dad had accumulated in the barnyard.

And Mom often said that Dad had wrecked her life.

And now this woman's car door was wrecked, as an act of revenge: one wreck for another.

G
RANDMA SEEMED TO
have recovered from our encounter with the harlot by the time we arrived, late as usual, to the ten o'clock service.