When I was a little girl, my grandmother was in her vigorous sixties. Zipping around in her black-and-white Thunder-bird with her long shins and narrow feet, she was my model for engagement with the world. When I went places with Mama, I felt as if we were really going places: it’s only now that I see that we were flying around in her cage. I felt safe with Mama, flying around in her cage.
She got her cars at Glamore’s Ford, in Smithtown, trading in the old one for a new one every two years. Mama believed in Glamore’s and the Ford Motor Company and wore an “I Like Ike” button, while her children drove beat-up foreign cars and voted for Adlai Stevenson. Mama couldn’t resist Ike, because he was a general. She liked war. She remembered how as a girl she had relished postcards of Havana Harbor with a little fuse in back that you could light to blow up the Maine. In 1917, when she was twenty-nine, she had rushed down to Washington, with her sister Hester, to hear the Senate declare war. When she was in her eighties and the world was in the grip of the nuclear predicament, she would puzzle over her young self’s warlike propensities as she lay in bed in the morning. But I don’t believe she had really changed. In that same period, she had a South Vietnamese general weeding her garden, and when he didn’t recognize her Western herbs and pulled them up she said that he couldn’t have been a very good general and fired him. Mama liked victory.
Mama believed in supper for children at six, with a menu such as peas, mashed potatoes, roast chicken, a glass of milk, and pudding with a cookie. In the Red Cottage we had bohemian food, like pasta, or lentils, or herring. Once, when Mama came over to the Red Cottage on a summer evening and saw no signs of a supper of any kind being prepared, she asked us children lolling in the long grass what was going on, and my sister Madeleine said, “We’re just drifting in boats.” Mama told the drifting-in-boats story again and again, gasping with surprise. How could she have been surprised? Once, all the clocks in the Red Cottage had broken and my mother said she liked it that way and wasn’t going to get them fixed or get a new clock, and Mama said, “If you will not accept a clock from me I shall blow up your house.”
For Mama, there were people who were important and people who weren’t. She referred to the friends of one of her daughters as “odd job lots of people,” for example. Chanlers—her family on her father’s side—were important, certainly. Above all Mama’s mother, Daisy, and her father, Winthrop Chanler, were important; in comparison with them Mama was shadowy as was her whole life. When John Lindsay was elected mayor of New York Mama said, “It’s nice to have a white man in politics.” (Lindsay’s predecessors were Vincent Impelliteri and Robert Wagner.) When Mama was old she grew roses, and once she drove by an old man tending a beautiful rose garden in the working-class part of the village, and she almost stopped, but she didn’t, and then thought about it for weeks afterward. She thought about driving over and knocking on his door and talking about roses, but she couldn’t do it. In a way, Mama’s racism and snobbery were a highly restricting form of shyness. I’m not sure why, but Mama thought that I was important. Grandma White too had thought that I was important—but as a little girl, the way the apples from her old apple tree were important as apples. Mama would remark on my red hair (a latent reference to Stanford), or on how I had a naturally good seat on a horse. With her, there were expectations of outstanding performance connected to being important.
The important Chanlers were Mama’s eight aunts and uncles, her father Winthrop’s brothers and sisters, who had been famous for eccentricity and escapades. Mama’s aunts and uncles were connected to the idea of money in the family, but the real Chanler legacy was stories. Some Chanler stories were short; Uncle Willie’s way of communicating with an inattentive waiter at Delmonico’s: he took off his wooden leg and threw it at him, catching him squarely between the shoulder blades. Some Chanler stories were long but could be reduced to an image or a phrase; “French leave,” which ordinarily is a term for the covert departure a lover makes on hearing the tread of his paramour’s spouse on the stairs, in the family was a reference to the manner in which Uncle Archie escaped from the lunatic asylum. Another story was that when Uncle Bob Chanler married the famous opera singer Lina Cavalieri, in Paris, and signed over his fortune to her, Uncle Archie cabled him, “Who’s loony now?” This phrase entered the language overnight. Comedians, columnists, and preachers snapped it up, and it inspired a comic strip of that name. Even today “Who’s loony now?” surfaces from time to time, in a headline or in jocular repartee, its origins long forgotten. Archie’s quip is the most famous of the Chanler achievements.
The Chanlers, not Stanford, were our myth. We were Chanlers, so it was always surprising when people identified us as “the Stanford White family,” thereby showing that they had no idea who we were. The Chanler stories were light and, above all, funny, yet there was an urgency in the way the crazy things the Chanlers had done were recounted. It was as if somewhere inside these stories—which were for the most part little more than snatches, vignettes, and splinters—there was the flash of a grail-like truth. Something about our family that we needed to know.
Though Mama herself was not throwing wooden legs or taking leave of asylums, it was through her that we were Chanlers. This was a confusing thing about Mama. Her good wool suits and her pearls and the way she had her hair done regularly—in contrast to the bohemian style of the other women on the Place—somehow coexisted with the Chanleresque attitude that the purpose of life was to generate outrageous stories. None of us ever got used to it. When one of my sisters grew up and was arrested for shoplifting in Italy and had to escape through the Alps on a flatcar—with no coat and only a small basket of possessions—she cringed to think of her respectable grandmother’s reaction. But when Mama found out she said, “You’re the only one around here who’s having any fun,” and wrote her a big check. Mama’s handbag was tidy, and the money in her wallet seemed a natural extension of the tidiness there, but mostly she wrote checks. Her handwriting was freewheeling but steady, like clouds being blown fast while keeping their banked formation.
Only two of the original Chanlers were alive in my time, Aunt Alida and Aunt Margaret. Aunt Alida, whose married name was Emmet, lived in a big house on Stony Brook Harbor that we visited often. (Alida Chanler and Ella Smith married brothers, Temple and Devereux Emmet, which is how Aunt Alida ended up on Stony Brook Harbor.) She had a great Empress’s head with a Roman nose, strong high cheekbones, one regally direct eye, and another that was crossed, so that her gaze clashed like swords. She was domineering yet absent-minded. “Psyche Sleeps” was the title she gave to a book of sonnets she wrote. She wore enormous rings on her fingers, and full-length gowns in which she served high tea. Aunt Alida’s teas were splendid. They included several kinds of cake, and tiny scones split and drenched in melted butter, and, of course, there was Aunt Alida herself, breathing hard, her massive visage with its clashing gaze concentrated to frowning behind the looming silver service.
With my cousins Ben and Sam—Uncle Peter’s sons—I often played cards with Aunt Alida, old-fashioned games, like euchre and casino. She would teach us these games, and then—once again, concentrated to a frown and breathing hard—cheat, and consequently always win. After she became partly bedridden the card table would be set up in her bedroom, and we learned to maneuver her into the chair with its back to a mirror so that we could see her cards and beat her at her own game.
Aunt Alida was a Catholic convert. Enormous wooden rosary beads hung on the wall at the head of her canopied bed and she had a penchant for dousing people and objects with holy water which she kept in plentiful supply. One story had it that Uncle Archie once visited her in a bright-red car, with an enormous black manservant and chauffeur. As Archie had been reported in the newspapers to have had conversations with a Confederate officer in Hell who had described Satan favorably, Aunt Alida therefore concluded from the color of Archie’s car that his manservant was the Devil and drenched him as well as the car in holy water, hoping that he would flee. The manservant was unperturbed, however. Aunt Alida knew that her brother was superstitious; her next strategy was to frighten him. She had two enormous gilt-framed portraits that hung in her front hall rigged so that they crashed down, spontaneously, it seemed. Archie, with car and manservant, left instantly.
At tea, a few of Aunt Alida’s eight aging children were usually around: Willie Emmet, six feet eight and skinny as a beanpole, peering at us through a crack in the door; his sister Marga, broad-shouldered and big bosomed, with silver-white hair swept back, declaiming in a breathy passionate way, but deaf, and so unable to participate in an exchange; Jane, with a rag-doll figure but bolt upright in her chair, silent and staring outward under iron-gray bangs. The Emmets were abstracted and quixotic, with theatrical voices that could suddenly develop a melodramatic quaver or go into a theatrical crescendo in an archaic upper-class accent mixed with a German “r” that they had acquired from a series of Fräuleins that Aunt Alida had hired as governesses. One afternoon, in the Red Cottage garden, Willie Emmet was having tea with my mother under the apple tree. He was sitting on a kitchen chair and he was talking non-stop. As he talked he began to lean over to one side, lowering his head, lower and lower, always talking, with my mother listening, until his head rested upside down on the ground: he continued talking even then.
The Chanler stories surged around in family life like a flock of birds, creating an atmosphere of whimsicality within which what was disturbing about certain incidents in the family—Johnny with a gun, for instance—was lost. Also lost was the fact that the Chanlers were orphans and this despite the fact that they were famous for being orphans—they were known to the world as the Astor Orphans. This was because they were the great-great-grandchildren of John Jacob Astor, but of both the Astor connection and the orphaning I heard not a whisper in the library at Box Hill.
What I did hear of was Rokeby—the house in the Hudson River Valley in which the Chanlers had grown up. The way Mama said “Rokeby” was full of longing, almost brokenhearted, and projected a cradling kind of place deep in the world. The word Rokeby conveyed a promise of deep connectedness and peace: of coming to rest in family love. No other word in the family vocabulary conveyed such a feeling of homing.
Rokeby was serious, but Aunt Alida’s sister Margaret, who presided at Rokeby in my time, was, like all Chanlers, funny. Many of the stories about Aunt Margaret had to do with her intolerance. She was intolerant of divorce, which she called “plural marriage,” and of trousers on women, which she called “the divided pedestal,” and of alcohol, which was banned at Rokeby in her time. Divorced people were not allowed in Rokeby either, even though that category came to include several of her brothers; nor were Catholics, and that meant her sister Alida. Mama’s mother (Daisy Terry Chanler) had, like Aunt Alida, converted to Catholicism, and we, her Catholic descendants, were banned from Rokeby too. Mama was born at Rokeby when it still belonged collectively to the then youthful Chanlers. Aunt Margaret, who was sixteen at the time, spent hours adoring Mama in her crib. But when at two or three weeks of age Mama was baptized Catholic, Aunt Margaret declared that it would have been better if she had been murdered.
When Aunt Margaret became the proprietress of Rokeby, however, she allowed Mama, and only Mama of our clan, to visit, on the ground that Mama had been born there. This is typical of Aunt Margaret’s reasoning, in which Rokeby itself becomes a kind of power overruling some of the rules that she herself has made. When I was seven Mama decided to take me to Rokeby: I, who was not born in the house, would be swept through the gates on the swoosh of Mama’s exemption.
Mama drove from Long Island to Rokeby as if she were riding a steed through an exotic countryside, soaring over hedges and streams. Once we were on the mainland, she pointed out rock faces rising beside the highway and said, “Look at that. You’ll never see anything like that on Long Island.” There was another component of her mood, something I recognized later as an adult when she talked about Rokeby—a sense of shyness lifting, of going to the place where she could be herself. We zoomed up a drive to a house that was big and white and hard to read architecturally. It rode the crest of a hill like an unwieldy ferry. Then we got out of the car and everything was very still. Aunt Margaret came out. She was small and wore a long dress, and had a nut-brown look about her. She was not effusive at all, but she was welcoming and kind. She told me about the big cacti that stood in front of the house in pots. They were called century plants, she said, because they bloomed only once in a century. They had bloomed only a few years ago, and so we figured out that I would be a very old lady or quite possibly dead when they bloomed again.
* * *
There were originally eleven Chanlers, from Archie to Egerton, but a daughter died in infancy, leaving ten. Their parents were John Winthrop Chanler and Margaret Astor Ward, a great-grandchild of John Jacob Astor. Margaret inherited Rokeby from her grandfather, William Waldorf Astor, John Jacob’s son. But she never lived in it, for she died within the year. The children, in turn, inherited it from her, and moved in with their father immediately after her death. Within the year, their father too had died, leaving the ten children—Archie, Wintie, Elizabeth, Willie, Marion, Lewis, Margaret, Bob, Alida, and Egerton—ages thirteen to one. A board of trustees, mostly elderly Astor relatives, discharged their duties to the children from afar, largely by surveying the household accounts.
The Chanlers, from start to finish, lent themselves to storytelling, but somehow the heart of their story—the catastrophic nature of these successive deaths—was lost in the fanfare of minor myths and tales that arose around them. Even Lately Thomas, an established biographer who took the Chanlers on as a subject in his book A Pride of Lions, does not seem to register the catastrophe. His book is dedicated to “Fantasy,” a strange choice for a biographer under any circumstances, and it is typical of his approach that the chapter that ends with the death of the children’s mother is followed by one that opens with a list of the social luminaries who attended her funeral. As for the Chanlers themselves, it would seem that in the face of these disasters they resorted to stoicism. The only expression of grief that I have found is an indirect one in Aunt Margaret’s memoir in a section that has to do with animals at Rokeby:
Unlike horses, oxen are not credited with affection for humans. Nevertheless, one of them fancied my father. He would move to the farmyard gate on a Sunday as soon as we were in sight. The night before Winthrop Chanler died this ox managed to get out of the barn, moved up to the mansion, stood under my father’s window and lowed pitifully. I saw and heard him, for my window was next to my father’s.
Rokeby was a children’s republic. Bob’s goats were in and out of the house unsupervised, and a herd of dogs accompanied the children everywhere. “Chanlers always sat up with a sick dog,” Aunt Margaret wrote many years later in a memoir. Mary Marshall, an impoverished relative from the South who was not a strong authority, was the only non-paid, parental presence. A tutor, Bostwick, was sunk in deep silence much of the time (Bob was discovered at nine trying to read a book upside down); sometimes there were additional instructors, a piano teacher, a French teacher. And there were a number of servants, most of whom came directly from feudal Ireland and regarded the children with deference, inculcating in them a sense of their own importance that was wildly out of scale with the society in which they were to live their adult lives. On Sundays, the servants’ day off, nothing was done for the children in the normal way, although the boys did spend time outside the servants’ wing conducting dogfights, which the servants considered a blood sport suitable for young gentlemen, and therefore encouraged over the objections of Mary Marshall. She could not intervene, because her authority did not extend to that wing.
Dogfights were not always intentional. Bob ended a particularly vicious one between two of the dogs, Spot and Jody, in the drawing room, by biting Jody’s tail. Fights were not always between dogs either. Aunt Margaret later wrote in her memoir:
Challenges were flung to you, awake or asleep. Words poured out of you in defense. Very early the rule was established that there was to be no striking during quarrels. “Take it out in words” hurt nobody. I have seen a frenzied boy whirling around his head the long green baize contraption filled with shot, used to keep draughts off the floor. The rule was “no striking.”
The children devised games “gentle and violent,” according to Aunt Margaret—one “a gruesome witch game.” Another that she recalled took place in the dim hall, and was called “still pond; no moving!” Second sight abounded at Rokeby. Old Jane, a black nurse of whom it was later said that she was the only one who could handle the Chanler boys, had second sight, and after she died she became a ghost that could be heard sweeping the floor in the tower room where she had expired. Another nurse, Mrs. Meroney, was regularly in communication with her dead brother.
Irish wakes were held in the house frequently: in addition to the Rokeby servants there were several tenant-farming families on the Chanlers’ four hundred acres, and then there were the men who ran the Rokeby farm proper. In her memoir Aunt Margaret wrote of the wake of a boy who had been murdered in one of the tenant farmers’ cottages. It was winter and there was deep snow on the ground; she remembered watching from the window as the boy’s coffin was carried away on a sleigh over the hills. Two Chanler children died as well in the Rokeby period: Egerton, the youngest, of a brain tumor when he was three, and Marion of pneumonia when he was fourteen. Lewis was the closest in age to Marion and after Marion’s death he nearly died himself of peritonitis. Similarly Alida, who was closest to Egerton, nearly died after his death, but in this instance no cause was recorded. “Were we all to die?” Margaret wrote. Before most of the children were grown, Mary Marshall, at fifty, was dead too.
And so the enduring parental figure in the children’s lives was the house itself. In her memoir Aunt Margaret wrote of Rokeby, “The place from the beginning has been beloved by those who owned it—by those who might have owned it—and by many who have been only occasional guests. [It inspires] immoderate affection. I myself am capable of praying that he who comes to hold the place without love may be unhappy in his life and death.”
* * *
On reaching their majority, each of the Chanler children came into two hundred and fifty thousand dollars (equivalent to roughly ten million dollars today). Archie, as the oldest, was expected to become the master of Rokeby and was left an extra hundred thousand for the upkeep of the house and land. The girls were left an extra fifty thousand each in case they didn’t marry. Archie was also appointed executor of the will upon reaching twenty-one, and guardian of the children. He declined these roles, however, deeply disappointing his brothers and sisters, who saw in his abdication a violation of their father’s sacred wish.
When the Chanler girls emerged from Rokeby to enter society, the Astor aunts found them in need of remedial polishing. As for the boys, Bostwick, their tutor, later said that hog farming was the only occupation he was equipped for after coping with them. (Indeed, he became a hog farmer.) And yet the Chanlers also had an extreme polish overlaid on the barbarity that Rokeby life engendered. Possibly they had acquired a backward-looking tendency as they yearned for their parents; others have speculated that the feudal values of the caretaker-servants influenced them in this way. In any event they all had qualities of formality and courtliness, of eighteenth-century grace and quixotic high-mindedness, qualities that made them seem old-fashioned in their own time and not quite of this world.
Sometime in the late eighties, Archie, then in his mid-twenties and moving in New York society, met Stanford White. They became good friends, with Archie looking up to Stanford, who was ten years older. Stanford was invited to Rokeby and was soon friendly with all the young Chanlers. These lovable, wounded socialites with big personalities and a tendency to do as they pleased were perfect for him. He took them all under his wing.
Much was needed at Rokeby, but one of the most obvious needs was for someone to do something about the house itself. There was no central heating. In winter, water in glasses at bedsides would be frozen in the morning. The plumbing consisted of a privy just east of the house, albeit a large privy, with a mansard roof and two sections—one trimmed with pine for the servants, and one trimmed with walnut for the quality folk. Stanford had a basement blasted out underneath the dining room, and put in a furnace, and upstairs he put in bathrooms. He rectified mistakes in taste that the Astors had made, such as replacing wooden mantels of a simple, classical design with fancy Italianate ones of marble (Judge Smith made the same mistake). He tried to make Rokeby efficient by creating a curious confluence of two interfacing second-floor landings—one in the servants’ wing and one in the main house—which he connected by a door, so that servants would be able to have access to the family bedrooms without using the main staircase. He put in a number of other doors where they were needed, and changed many of the first-floor windows to French doors. He also combined two of four drawing rooms into one large one, and covered the walls with a silvery-green patterned silk and the floor with a green carpet to bring the lawn through the French doors and into the room, he said.
All eight of the surviving Chanlers came to accept Stanford as a fixture in their lives. Each of them was in frequent correspondence with him and was involved with him in one way or another, enjoying his willingness to arrange trips and theatre tickets and parties for them, to acquire desired objects and dispense advice and information and even, when necessary, advance cash and not complain when the reimbursement was slow. When the three girls decided that they would like a house in New York, it was Stanford who found them one they could afford. He went on to renovate and decorate it, taking into account the needs of each. He also continued to keep an eye on Rokeby, of which the three girls had become the sole proprietors through an arrangement made by their brothers. The Chanler boys assumed that their sisters, because of various defects (Alida’s crossed eye, a hip disease of Elizabeth’s, and Margaret’s supposed plainness), would never marry.
To the Chanlers it was a matter of the utmost seriousness that they distinguish themselves, to honor their parents and to solidify their identity as a family, though how exactly this was to be done was unclear. Archie went to Columbia Law School, graduated, and was admitted to the New York bar in 1885. Instead of practicing law, however, he decided to become an opera singer. Margaret later developed this ambition as well, but Archie, who had by then abandoned singing to stalk the Apache chief Geronimo out West, discouraged her from pursuing it for reasons that are not recorded. In the summer of 1884 Archie and Wintie, the brother nearest him in age (later to become Mama’s father), decided to make a grand tour of Europe, a way of life that as a gentleman of leisure Wintie would adopt permanently. In Rome Archie fell in love with Daisy Terry, who was a first cousin once removed: Daisy’s parents were expatriates and she had been born and raised there. But it was Wintie who got Daisy; they married in December of 1886. Archie seems not to have been put out by this, for the summer after he had met Daisy in Rome he met, at Newport, Amelie Rives.
Amelie Rives was an exquisitely beautiful, highborn novelist from Virginia: one of her later novels was called “Virginia of Virginia.” She had purple eyes, wrote dramatic, perfumed letters in an extravagant script in purple ink, and exercised an irresistible charm. Archie became a frequent guest at the Rives estate at Castle Hill, in Virginia’s Albemarle County, near Charlottesville. Then, in April of 1888, Amelie published a novel called “The Quick or the Dead?” The plot of “The Quick or the Dead?” revolves around a beautiful young heroine whose dead husband comes to her as a ghost, while she falls in love with his cousin, who looks exactly like him. Tension arises from the heroine’s struggle to choose between the living lover or the ghost. The novel created a scandal because of the orgiastic feelings that the heroine entertains for both men. (In the end she chooses the quick.) “The Quick or the Dead?” became a best-seller and Amelie became a celebrity, as did Archie, who was widely and publicly identified as the model for the identical men. This was the beginning of newspaper publicity about the Chanlers that was to disturb their socially august Astor relatives and also, in later years, perhaps to inure Mama to embarrassing exposure in the press. Mama was born to Wintie and Daisy at Rokeby in the year before “The Quick or the Dead?” came out. At that time no one was inured.
Archie’s mass popularity as the hero of a sex novel neither pleased the Astors nor fulfilled his brothers and sisters’ fantasies of distinction. Wintie and Margaret were especially appalled. But then they all met Amelie and, one after another, they found that they could not but love her, and declare her brilliant. For a time, Aunt Margaret became Amelie’s intimate friend and steadfast champion, a bewildering alliance given Margaret’s principled puritanism, though no more bewildering perhaps than her fast friendship with Stanford White. On entering the Chanler circle, Amelie inevitably found that Stanford White was in her life as well.
Then, in June, Archie and Amelie married without notifying the family, thus devastating and infuriating them all over again. But the newlyweds visited Rokeby, and again thanks to Amelie’s charm all was forgiven. After the visit, Archie took Amelie on an extended and elaborate honeymoon tour of England and Europe, very possibly paying for it out of the extra hundred thousand dollars that had been bequeathed him for the upkeep of Rokeby. The tour went well. Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Henry Adams all fell at Amelie’s feet and declared her a genius. The newlyweds returned separately, however, although they did subsequently live together at Merry Mills, an estate not far from Castle Hill that Archie had acquired. There Amelie began accusing Archie of frightening mood changes and, in letters to Rokeby, hinted at violence. There were separations and reconciliations, all highly publicized. Then, in a period in which they were together, Amelie stopped writing and instead took to her bed or, alternately, ran around in the Merry Mills woods at night in a filmy white robe. One night, she was nearly shot by a servant who took her for a ghost. It emerged that Amelie was a morphine addict. Finally, in 1894, she and Archie went to a ball in London at which Prince Troubetzkoy of Poland was present. Archie lightly told Amelie she ought to marry the Prince because he was so handsome and they would make such a handsome couple, and Amelie divorced Archie and did. All this too was well publicized.
Archie rebounded from the Amelie debacle by going into business with Wintie and Stanford. The three formed the Roanoke Rapids Power Company and also the United Industrial Company, an affiliate that would make textiles. The enterprise required not just a mill and a power plant but a whole town for the workers: it involved building Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, from scratch. Besides investing in the company, Stanford designed everything, including housing. His two “turtletop” houses are regarded as landmarks today and are among the very few of Stanford’s ventures into architecture for working-class people. The houses were fine, and the mill and the plant were handsome, but Stanford knew nothing about making textiles or generating power, so both mill and plant turned out to be useless. Rebuilding them drove costs way over budget. Pressure mounted. Archie and Wintie began to fight.
The Chanler boys had always roared at each other; indeed they rather missed their argumentative encounters when they were apart because nobody else was willing to “debate” in the same zestfully violent way. Wintie’s wife, Daisy, was horrified by the decibel level at Rokeby, although she did concede in their favor that the battles were over such matters as questions of social precedence or a fine theological point. Bob’s first wife, Julia Chamberlain, refused to return to Rokeby after witnessing what Bob called a mere “discussion” because she had felt that murder was about to take place. And indeed, at least once in a Rokeby discussion, knives flew. Nevertheless, the fights between Wintie and Archie at board meetings of the Roanoke Rapids Power Company, though purely verbal, seem to have been different from the start. For one thing, they went on and on, meeting after meeting, throughout 1896—with Stanford smack in the middle—in a way that made it difficult to conduct any business whatever.
In September of that year, Alida surprised everyone by becoming engaged to marry Temple Emmet, a young man from a distinguished Irish family of which Robert Emmet, a hero of the cause of Irish freedom, had been a member. The wedding took place at the end of October. It was Stanford, of course, who managed it all, who arranged for the train that would bring the two hundred guests from New York City to Rokeby, for the fashionable Hungarian orchestra, for the strolling Neapolitan minstrels, and for the tapestries to be hung from the front of the house. Grandma White had become a friend of the Chanlers and was there too. This was the first Chanler wedding at Rokeby, and Archie, as the oldest, representing their father, was to give Alida away. At the last minute, however, Archie sent a message that he didn’t feel well. He also sent a gift, but this was far from enough for his brothers and sisters. They were devastated by this latest abdication. In their view Archie should have been there even if he was at death’s door—as a good father would have been. Alida concluded that Archie’s absence could only mean that he was dying and she cried for hours. Wintie and Bob, on the other hand, concluded that Archie was “loony,” a term that got back to Archie. It was Wintie who gave the weeping bride away.
At the next meeting of the Roanoke Rapids Power Company, Archie and Wintie almost came to blows. The upshot was that Archie threatened to have Wintie’s performance as executor of their father’s estate audited. Wintie then declared that he would no longer speak to Archie. Archie then demanded that Wintie resign from the company board, on the ground that it was impossible to do business with someone who wouldn’t speak to him. Wintie complied with alacrity, leaving the realm of free enterprise forever, to live insouciantly beyond his means as a gentleman of leisure, travelling, shooting this and that, and falling off horses and breaking this and that to the point where eventually the only company that would insure his bones was Lloyd’s of London.
After Wintie’s resignation, Archie had himself elected president of the company, but actually he had been losing interest in business concerns. For some time, he had been wanting to investigate what we would call parapsychological phenomena. Stanford offered to look after the business for him, and Archie gave him his power of attorney and retreated to Merry Mills to develop what he called his X faculty. Archie’s X faculty sent messages to him in Ouija-board style through a planchette; it sent a reliable stock-market tip, but it also told him, erroneously, as it turned out, that he could pick up live coals without being burned.
Then Elizabeth defied expectations too, and on April 24, 1898, married John Jay Chapman, a pundit, opinionist, and literary man known alternately as the greatest master of expository prose in America and as the inspiration for Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase “lunatic fringe.” After Elizabeth’s wedding, Margaret announced that she did not intend to marry, and convinced Alida and Elizabeth that they should therefore give her their shares in Rokeby. The unfairness of this so disturbed Chapman that he had a nervous breakdown that prevented him from leaving his bed in the tower for a year. There he was nursed by both Margaret and Elizabeth. During his illness he became convinced that he was blind, and those caring for him perpetuated his delusion by blacking out the windows because they were afraid that he would be traumatically upset if he found out that he actually could see. Margaret kept Rokeby, however.
Archie’s X faculty had, in this period, told him that he could change the color of his eyes if he stood looking west out a window at a specified time, holding a pearl stickpin in one hand and looking deeply into a mirror he held in the other. Archie reported that he had followed these instructions—he was serious about his experiments and informed the press of developments—and that as a result his eyes had turned from light brown to gray. This alarmed the Astors. Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy backed Archie up by stating that when she was married to him his eyes, like those of both her heroes in “The Quick or the Dead?,” had been “a sparkling, light-brown hue.” Oculists, for their part, testified that they were now gray.
Wintie, who was still not speaking to Archie and therefore could not investigate the matter for himself, induced Stanford to take a trip to Merry Mills and lure Archie back to New York. So Stanford wrote to Archie saying that he would like to visit, but Archie wrote back saying that he was “ill” and did not want to be visited. Stanford went anyway, taking with him a Dr. Fuller. Archie was intensely annoyed when they arrived, but Stanford pushed right in. He proceeded to chat with Archie and try to charm him, to warm him up. He eventually succeeded, and then worked on him to come up to New York on the ground that what he needed was a plunge into “the metropolitan whirl.” Archie went, speaking freely by this time about his experiments with his X faculty.
In New York, Archie checked into the Kennsington Hotel where his X faculty told him that sometime soon he should go into a “Napoleonic trance,” in the course of which he would reënact the death of Napoleon. Soon thereafter, during a visit from Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Archie realized that the time had arrived. He stretched out on his bed and looked at his reflection in his shaving mirror, gasped for breath convulsively for ten minutes, and then put the mirror down and closed his eyes. The trance, in which he began to look like Napoleon, took hold. Saint-Gaudens was terrified. When Archie came out of his trance, Gus begged him never to do it again.
The next day Stanford came to visit with Dr. Fuller and asked Archie to go into the trance for them. Archie complied, and in the middle of it he heard Stanford whisper, “It is exactly like Napoleon’s death mask! I have a photograph of it at home.” Archie also invited reporters to come to his hotel room and observe his trance. He told them emphatically that he did not believe he was Napoleon but that the trance and the X faculty were a manifestation of a power within himself.
Next there was another visit by Dr. Fuller, who came with a man who said he was an oculist and examined Archie’s eyes and asked him lots of questions. On the following day, the alleged oculist showed up with two burly attendants and informed Archie that in fact he was Dr. Moses Allen Starr, professor of nervous diseases at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, president of the New York Neurological Society and of the American Neurological Association, and Medical Examiner in lunacy. Dr. Starr said that he had a court order for Archie’s commitment on the ground of insanity. Archie’s X faculty, however, had warned him that danger was imminent, and in preparation he had hidden a loaded revolver under his pillow.
Dr. Starr left without Archie that day, but the next day two armed policemen came with a warrant for Archie’s arrest as a dangerous lunatic with homicidal tendencies. Archie was clapped into Bloomingdale, the New York Hospital asylum for the insane, in White Plains. “I am insane because I say that my eyes have changed color,” Archie wrote to an attorney in Virginia in an attempt to get released. The commitment order was signed by his brothers Lewis and Wintie.
Archie believed that his brothers and sisters were having him incarcerated because they wanted his money. The Chanlers were many things, but they were not venal. Indeed, Elizabeth concluded that Archie was insane precisely because of this belief. Still, it’s possible that his brothers and sisters were angry at him for squandering the money left for the upkeep of Rokeby. Certainly some of them were still bitterly disappointed by his refusal to be head of the family. Furthermore, while subsequent generations celebrated the Chanlers for their craziness, they themselves were touchy about the idea of tainted genes. Their father had had a sister who was kept in the attic, and the Astors consequently worried that the Chanlers might disgrace them. Archie also believed that the director of the asylum, Dr. Lyon, kept him there only for the five thousand dollars a year that he brought in. In this Archie may have had a point. He mentioned the five thousand dollars to Lyon often, and when he read in the newspaper that a parrot had halted a robbery by shrieking “Stop, thief!” he pressed Lyon to obtain the bird for him.
Wintie and Lewis urged Stanford to use Archie’s power of attorney to petition the court to declare Archie insane and thus deprive him of access to his money, which he was using in legal maneuvers to free himself. Stanford did petition the court successfully, though he had been unsuccessful in an attempt to have the hearing in White Plains, so that Archie could attend, “if necessary on a stretcher.” Stanford was caught in the middle again. The upshot of the hearing was that Archie was certified as insane in New York and thereby prevented from using his own money. Archie’s contempt for his caretakers was not without foundation. One of the doctors who testified at his hearing later claimed that he could identify a paranoid by sight alone, from a distance of seven feet, by the shape of his head.
Cut off from his funds, Archie decided that God had placed him in his predicament so that he would champion the rights of the insane, a cause for which he considered himself particularly well suited because of a temperament that enabled him “to stay angry for life.” He started to work on a tract, “Four Years Behind the Bars of ‘Bloomingdale’; or, The Bankruptcy of Law in New York.” He also began producing large numbers of sonnets, denunciatory in tone. Archie strove to emphasize that the sonnets were by his X faculty, pointing out that while he had never before been able to write a line of poetry, he was now producing sonnets by the hundred. (This did indeed baffle the doctors though it needn’t have; sonneteering was a Chanler characteristic. Both Aunt Margaret and Aunt Alida published volumes of sonnets. Margaret wrote in her memoir, “I can rest at a moment’s notice. I can write a sonnet in twenty minutes. I am often dreadfully disappointed when this chosen delight is over quickly, and I see that pondering is not going to improve the lines.”)
Eventually, having conducted himself as a model patient, Archie earned the privilege of taking walks outside Bloomingdale’s grounds on his word of honor as a gentleman that he would not abuse the privilege. One day, after his last legal recourse had failed, he borrowed ten dollars, sauntered through the gate of the asylum, and walked to the railroad station. Behind him he left a perfect note for Dr. Lyon.
My Dear Doctor:
You have always said that I am insane. You have always said that I believe I am the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte. As a learned and sincere man, you, therefore, will not be surprised that I take French Leave.
Yours, with regret that we must part,
J. A. Chanler
“He pledged his word as a gentleman that he would not escape!” wailed Dr. Lyon.
At the station Archie caught a train to New York and travelled right on through to Philadelphia, where he visited Dr. J. Madison Taylor, an eminent neurologist. Using a pseudonym, he had telegraphed Taylor from Grand Central Station: in person he revealed his identity and persuaded the doctor to harbor him incognito for whatever length of time he needed to arrive at an opinion on his sanity. After nine months, Dr. Taylor told Archie that in his opinion he was quite sane, whereupon Archie suddenly surfaced in Virginia to sensational coverage in the press. He was safe in Virginia, because the court that had declared him insane had jurisdiction only in New York. Eventually, a citizen petitioned the Albemarle County court to rule on Archie’s sanity in Virginia, an opportunity that Archie welcomed. Through attorneys, Lewis petitioned Archie to delay the proceedings so that Wintie could return from Europe, and Willie from Mexico, where he was adventuring. Archie gladly did this, looking forward with joy to a reconciliation with his family and firing off telegrams to all, declaring it time to let bygones be bygones.
When the great day came, Dr. Taylor and other eminences testified to Archie’s sanity. His witnesses included officials of the Roanoke Rapids Power Company. Among the letters from experts writing in Archie’s behalf was a strong statement from the philosopher William James extolling Archie’s interest in the unexplored field of automatism.
On November 6, 1901, almost without contest, Archie was declared sane in Virginia. All of this was reported in the newspapers, with Archie identified in most of the stories as “the former husband of Amelie Rives.” And so he became known as the man who was insane in New York and sane in Virginia. Endless quips about this peculiar status would follow him all his life and beyond, right into the Box Hill library, where I would hear about my great-uncle Archie, insane in New York and sane in Virginia—a splinter of a story with no context. Certainly no mention was made in the library that Archie’s brothers and sisters failed to show up at the Albemarle County hearing.
Archie was so wounded by the failure of his brothers and sisters to attend that he changed his name to Chaloner—what the name Chanler had been originally—and began referring to his “ex-brothers and sisters.” Their continued hostility to him was further made plain when, immediately after the Virginia verdict, he instituted proceedings to regain his rights in New York where most of his wealth was located. Again his brothers and sisters obstructed his efforts, as they would until 1919, when he finally prevailed.
Archie continued to write, channelling “his surging energies through the typewriter,” as a Virginian friend put it in a memoir. He published the results with a new company that he had set up, the Palmetto Press of Roanoke Rapids, South Carolina. His works include a play called “Robbery Under the Law,” in which Wintie had become a character called Winston Blettermole and Stanford White had become James Lawless. He completed “Four Years Behind the Bars of ‘Bloomingdale’; or, The Bankruptcy of Law in New York,” which included verse as well as prose. “Scorpio,” a book of sonnets, had a purple cover that showed the strands of a cat-o’-nine-tails terminating in scorpions and dripping blood. One reviewer called “Scorpio” the “anchovy paste on the buttered toast of our literature.” The sonnets in “Pieces of Eight” were, according to the New York Tribune, of a “rare and awe-inspiring violence”; so vituperative that their author exhausted the Anglo-Saxon store of invective and had to turn to French. Archie was, in this prolific period, still fighting for his money that was locked up by the insanity decree in New York.
* * *
While Archie was incarcerated, the Spanish-American War had been taking place. This was the Chanlers’ war, as it turned out. Margaret, as a nurse on a typhoid ship, became known as the Angel of Puerto Rico—forty years after the war her services were recognized by Congress with a special medal. Willie and Wintie charged up San Juan Hill, in groups supporting Teddy Roosevelt. Alida became known for having driven into a base camp in Florida in a buggy and said to her husband in a carrying voice, “You must come home, Temple. I find that this war is dangerous.” (Temple complied.) After the war, Willie was elected as a Democrat first to the State Assembly and then, from the solidly Republican 14th District of New York, to Congress. (It was his swashbuckling image as a war hero that carried him.) Margaret went to both Albany and Washington with Willie, and served as his hostess in both those cities. She became involved in a number of political movements on her own, including temperance, this last a direct result of experiences with Willie.
Both Lewis and Bob made unsuccessful runs for office in Dutchess County, and then, in 1906, Lewis ran for lieutenant governor of New York with Willie as an adviser, and Bob ran for sheriff of Dutchess County, campaigning on horseback in a ten-gallon hat and wearing a six-shooter. Aunt Margaret was the manager of both campaigns, and Rokeby was the headquarters; indeed, Rokeby became, in this period, the Democratic headquarters for the whole state. Bob announced his candidacy at a clambake that he gave at Chanler Park, an amusement park he had set up near Rokeby as a business enterprise. The clambake, supervised by Aunt Margaret, was attended by five thousand people who were entertained by the Chanler Brass Band, the Chanler baseball team, the Chanler Drum Corps, and the Chanler Hook and Ladder Company (actually the volunteer fire department of Red Hook, New York, but organized by Bob). The guests were served sixty-five thousand clams, twenty-two hundred pounds of potatoes, twelve hundred chickens, six thousand ears of corn, three thousand bottles of soda pop, three thousand bottles of beer, and five thousand cigars. The Chanler baseball team beat the team from Chatham. Lewis accepted the nomination for lieutenant governor in a speech on the porch at Rokeby. Lewis liked to make lengthy speeches. Alida, who had become a suffragette, regularly turned up to heckle Lewis when he was making a speech and then, when he was finished, to get up on a soapbox and make a speech of her own. Archie contributed to the campaign by lambasting Lewis’s running mate in Palmetto Press publications. In the fall, in the middle of the campaigns, Aunt Margaret, to everyone’s shock, married Richard Aldrich, the music critic of the New York Times. In November, both Lewis and Bob won.
But in June, before those events, Stanford was shot. In the storm of scandalous allegations that followed, Aunt Margaret, champion of abstinence and monogamy, boldly and firmly placed the following plaque in the front hall of Rokeby, of which she was now the sole proprietor:
STANFORD WHITE
Architect and Friend
1853–1906
As a child at Rokeby, I was naturally struck by the evidence everywhere of the past presence of children. There was a rocking chair for a one-year-old and an armchair for a two-year-old in the library, for example, dark little wooden chairs with plush pillows. Upstairs were children’s beds, also of different sizes: a bed for a five-year-old next to a bed for a seven-year-old, and a third, a bit larger, for a child of nine—all in one room, with matching ornate headboards. There were children’s desks all over, and rocking horses, their horsehair manes worn to a nub in the way only a child’s hard-used toy gets worn, the long hair of the tails pulled and mauled to stubble. On the attic floor, elaborate Edwardian toys—a little coach, a fancy well-sprung pram for a doll—stood alongside the trophies of Willie’s African expeditions.
When I was at Rokeby with Mama and Aunt Margaret, the tone of life from day to day was quiet, the quietness enhanced by the largeness of the house and Aunt Margaret’s manner of sitting on the porch or in the small drawing room and sewing while she talked to Mama in a formal way that seemed to dissolve linear time and contiguous space, as if there were no newspapers, or road to New York, or even progress in life such as moving from second to third grade. Yet the very air was dense with impacted emotions of a past time. Under high ceilings, the darkness of many portraits stood out from the softness of the old plaster like burned-through places in the ordinary texture of the world. Unlike Box Hill, Rokeby had no garden, just a bit of lawn and then the land rolling away, pitching down to the Hudson River in a slightly violent yet poetic motion that had the intensity of a demented aria.
Down among the barns was a shed in which enormous iceboats were piled on top of each other, their long blades conveying ferocious speed, their racy but broken-looking frames filmed with dust, caked straw, and bird droppings. There was talk of a pony that among the vast barns was nowhere to be seen. The problem was to get Cousin Dick to hitch the pony up to a cart so I could have a ride, but Cousin Dick did not appear. Cousin Dick was Aunt Margaret’s son, and he was somewhere in the house; Mama told me in private that he was an alcoholic, and that he drank somewhere on the third floor. Eventually he did appear, and the pony and the cart were hitched up. I don’t remember the ride. What I do remember is Aunt Margaret taking a snapshot with her Brownie camera, and the snapshot itself, which she later sent on. The photograph was black-and-white and a little washed out, on thin paper with serrated edges that were inclined to curl. Cousin Dick was holding the pony’s reins just below the bit, with his chest stuck out absurdly in mock pride, and with a big grin, a grin full of fury and blind-seeming eyes behind glasses. He was wearing plaid Bermuda shorts. I can’t remember myself, but Mama I see clearly, with my adult eye. What I surely must have seen then in some way was a Mama who was not at all the long-shinned Mama who had sped me to Rokeby over jumps. I saw a Mama who was a little overweight at the hips, leaning to one side in her summer dress, smiling in her elegant, slightly lupine way, but sad, empty, at a dead end, having come up empty, perhaps, on our trip to Rokeby, where she’d been looking for her family, for Wintie, her father, for the Chanlers, looking for her cradle, and finding that Rokeby was only Aunt Margaret with Cousin Dick all alone.
The convergence of the Stanford White and Chanler lines is a crucial nexus in the ancestry of the Place. In Rokeby there were screens, statues, paintings of predators assaulting prey, many of them by Uncle Bob who became an artist of distinction. In the back hall hung one of his works, a large painting on wood called “The Dance of Death.” There skeletons swarmed up a black hill as fish swam in schools in the ocean beneath the hill, and a flock of cranes flew in the sky. The room that had been the nursery was called the Crow Room, because when Bob was a teen-ager he had painted a fresco on the wall: black crows blown helter-skelter over fields of red poppies against a dark-gray, stormy sky.