At the end of our day of looking at our great-grandfather’s buildings in New York, Pamela and I drove up to Newport to have a look at the Gilded Age palaces in which Stanford had had a hand—principally Rosecliff, the white confection that he built for Tessie Oelrichs. We arrived in Newport late at night and made our pilgrimage to Rosecliff the next morning. It was a beautiful summery day. There were roses and Saint-Gaudens statues in the gardens around the house, and swallows swooping around the delicate Renaissance façade. There were carvings of musical instruments in bunches on the façade, conveying conviviality and happiness. Through large, arched windows we could see through to the blue ocean on the other side of the house.
Pamela ran toward this pretty little palace, her arms stretched down, her hands out flat, and her strawberry-blond hair bouncing. I saw how different the meaning of the pilgrimage was for her from what it was for me. She had not grown up on the Place, and, even if she had, being so many years younger, her sense of Stanford would have been much more remote than mine. She was only proud of her great-grandfather, eager to honor him for his achievement and to bask in the reflection of his fame. I watched her go, and with her Grandpa and Grandma White, Mama and Papa, my mother and father, my sisters, my cousins, my uncles and aunts, my once husband, and, most beloved of all, my son—each in their impenetrable mystery, each in the passion of their life. Each one would write a history different from this one—some so different that it might be hard to connect them at all. I myself would write differently if I took on the task ten years hence—it would already be slightly altered if I started tomorrow. We live as irrevocably subjective in a changing perspective of time. This history, like all histories, can only be fathomed definitively by the true architect of desire, whose intentions, even in constructing infernal predicaments at the heart of our most tender relations, are, we have to trust, to serve love.