My brothers came to visit Mother as they had at her previous stroke, but when she neither improved nor faded, of necessity, they went back home to family and duty. I visited her often, usually with Jacques, sometimes alone, as she lay in the bedroom of her Paris home—as ever, not far from us. Did she think that close proximity would patch up our broken past? Over the years, I had grown to admire the woman who became Alva Belmont, but I’d never quite let her be “Mama” in my heart again.
One cold January day in 1933, as I sat alone with her, I realized she could not last much longer. She usually lay silent, so I was surprised when she opened her eyes and began to mutter. I leaned close to see if I could hear what she was saying. She had her earthly goods in order, and I thought she had made her peace with God, but she seemed suddenly so troubled.
“I knew it was wrong,” she said, looking straight up at the ceiling.
Oh, I thought. Will this be a deathbed confession that she should not have forced me to marry the duke? But she went on, disturbed, almost raving.
“My papa said it was not wrong—having slaves. I had my own slave, a little girl, Suley. But I knew it was wrong and I was angry.”
I pulled my chair closer to her bed and took her right hand, for her left one was stiff from disuse. I told her, “That was long ago, Mother, before the North-South War. Slavery is long over. You never had any slaves once you grew up.”
Even as I said that, I remembered when I was very angry in my youth, too, when she ordered me about like a slave.
“I tried to make up for it,” she whispered, sounding so desperate. “Others hated me when I said women’s rights were pointless unless Negro rights came, too. It was wrong to have a slave.”
“I understand, but you were just a child then. I agree, but—”
“It ruined him. Papa. That terrible system ruined him. Our home gone, the cotton fields. Mama dead. So I had to find a way and then I found William K. Vanderbilt. He married me, saved us, but I was still angry, because it was wrong. Papa!” she cried loudly to the room, certainly not to me, for I do not think she even knew I was there. “It was wrong! I tried to earn money another way! Papa, I married money for you, used it for good, but it was all wrong!”
I felt her relax. She had spent her energy and was surely going back to sleep. She did not quite sigh but exhaled. I waited, but she did not breathe again. Her hand went limp. Her eyes stayed open but looked far beyond me. Far beyond, forever now. Why had she never told me all this before? Perhaps she was pleading her case with God.
I sucked in a sob and bowed my head.
So much—so much!—had been wrong in her life, but she had boldly struggled to make some things right.
ALVA SMITH VANDERBILT Belmont was eighty-three years and nine days old when she died. Jacques and I took her casket to New York on the SS Berengaria for a funeral and burial she had already planned. Everything went according to her wishes—except for one thing. She had asked for a female celebrant, but we had to settle for a man because the burial was in the same church where I had married the duke, and they did not permit women to officiate. However, her pallbearers were all women, and what a buzz there was over that.
The date was Sunday, February 12. The congregation numbered at least fifteen hundred, a fitting tribute. The choir sang a hymn she herself had composed. For the other songs, she had allowed traditional hymns.
Forty elderly members of the National Woman’s Party, the NWP, wearing their traditional purple and gold, lined the way when the coffin was carried in, and many suffragettes passed in homage. They carried tattered, faded banners from their marches, but I stared at the one that seemed yet brand-spanking new and bold as ever: FAILURE IS IMPOSSIBLE, it read. That one was draped over her casket for the service.
I looked around the crowded church, holding Jacques’s hand but remembering how young and frightened and, yes, how angry I was—because to quote my mother’s final words, “It was wrong!”—that I was forced to marry here. Marry a man I hardly knew and did not love, but at least my sons and Jacques had made up for that.
The trip from the church to Woodlawn Cemetery was quite a parade: the family motorcars; three motorbuses with delegates from the NWP; policemen on motorized bicycles; and some classic, old-style limousines of her friends. A curious crowd, some with cameras, waiting there made me realize the newspapermen she had once manipulated were present. The family led the way into the tomb she had designed and had built—her last constructed, earthly edifice where her dear second husband, Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, already lay.
Once again, she had planned a short service here in the French Gothic chapel. It reminded me of the Gothic Room at Marble House, with its collection of crucifixes, where the duke had proposed to me. And again, I decided as I had when Papa was buried in the elaborate Vanderbilt mausoleum that I would never be entombed here. I wanted something simple, something outside, not closed in or grand.
A quartet sang two songs even here, then we heard the bugle call of “Taps” played off in the distance as if Mother were some departed, honored war hero. Finally, we left her casket in the tomb next to her beloved Oliver.
As I exited the chapel holding on to Jacques on one side and my brother Harold, called Mike, on the other, I realized he, too, had a bit of Mother in him, for he could be overbearing and difficult to love even though he had a brilliant mind. Our other brother, named Willie for Papa, was like our father, all easygoing charm.
My having been in Europe these years gave me an objectivity about things in America. So what if manners had changed here at home and men no longer doffed their hats to women? I was blessed with a man who spoiled me and adored me. I got on with both of my very different sons and was thrilled to be a grandmother. And, after everything I had been through, I treasured all that.
AFTER THE FUNERAL, I cherished some time with family and friends, especially the week we spent with my brothers Mike and Willie, even some Vanderbilt relatives Mother had been at war with since her divorce.
We also spent a lovely week with Mike’s family at his magnificent new house at Manalapan near Palm Beach, Florida. It was there I heard, quite indirectly, some advice that Mother had shared with a friend but not with me.
“Look here, on this condolence card,” Mike told me as I sat with him and his wife under a big umbrella on the beach. “It is from a friend of hers, Elsa Maxwell, see?” he said, thrusting it at Jacques and me and then pulling it back to himself and removing his sunglasses to squint at it. “She says Mother wrote her that her trouble with life was that she was born too late to fit into the old days and too soon for modern times, so that she wanted to change the next generation. If you want to be happy, Mother wrote this woman, live peacefully with your own dear ones in your own era.”
Peacefully! I thought. Not Alva V. Belmont. Not if you stood in the way of something she wanted. But perhaps I was more like her than I wanted to admit. Because right now, I wanted to fund and build a children’s hospital near Saint-Georges-Motel, and I was going to do it!
ON A HILL just outside the village, I bought property and retained an architect, plumbers, and electricians to build the children’s hospital and tuberculosis sanitarium. Jacques supported this project of my heart both morally and financially, and, once finished, it housed eighty youngsters, mostly aged one to five years, although several of the initial patients, like dear Katrine from the village, were older.
They were calling it “state of the art,” and it boasted wards, playrooms, and nursing staff facilities. I made certain there was also room for outside activities and play, as the young patients’ strength permitted.
I was certain there was nothing more innovative or up-to-date in Paris or London. In the sanitarium—our first patient was young Katrine and one of her brothers from the village—patients lived in separate, glass-walled rooms instead of wards. Each chamber had a built-in bath and each patient had toys galore.
“How is my dear Katrine today?” I asked as I stopped by her bed where she was cuddling a cloth doll. A bedspread of Balsan “blue-horizon” color was draped over her.
“Still coughing, madame. And my Dolly is too, see?” she said, giving the doll a few jerks. “But when I am well, must she still be ill and stay for the next girl in this place?”
“No, for you will get well together!” I promised her and squeezed her toes through the bedcovers. “Of course you will take her home with you to keep an eye on her just the way the nurses do you here.”
Her face lit in a smile. “Then I must get well soon, so she will too!”
A nurse bustled in. “Your cousin is here, madame, the one who paints and talks so much,” she told me as I scribbled in my ever-present notebook to buy more dolls so that they could go home with girl patients. And something likewise for the boys? I would have to ask around, but you might know Winston was here. Not my cousin exactly, but he always made such a stir.
I blew a kiss to Katrine and went out through my office and the back door, without finding Winston. Shaking my head, I strolled quickly back toward our gate, but saw only Clemmie coming out to meet me. I hugged her, and she told me, “He could not wait to get painting and found out you were what he calls ‘nursing’ again. He is painting the moat, fashioning it into a pond but is quite distressed there are no waves in it today,” she added with a little laugh as the two of us headed toward the château together. “But he has solved that handily and said to tell you that necessity is the mother of invention. He insists that is a Churchill quote not one from old times.”
“So what has he done now?” I asked as the moat came in sight. Was he clear around the back of it?
But I spotted him, sitting with his easel at the very bend of it around the side. “Consuelo, my dear,” he called out when he saw us coming. “I had to catch the light just right to make waves.”
“You are ever making waves!” I teased as we joined him, and then I saw what he meant. He had his valet—who was secretly also his bodyguard—sitting in an old rowboat in the moat, making waves with an oar.
“Cannot hug you right now, or I would smear you up with this off-white color I need for whitecaps,” he told me and bent back to his work. “When the time is right, carpe diem.”
“My,” Clemmie said, “but you are just chock-full of old Latin sayings today.”
He ignored that but soon turned toward me with a not only serious, but stern and sad look on his face. “Consuelo, we cannot stay long this time. Sunny’s ailing—actually, from cancer.”
I gasped. “I heard he was ill, but—neither Bert nor Ivor told me.”
“He just told them, as I am telling you—so that you can be of support to the boys, I mean. I asked Clemmie not to tell you so that I could. That is why,” he said, looking back at his half-finished painting, “the inland seas are rough today. Hell’s gates, if that little hospital of yours was not for children, I would admit myself straightaway. A psychiatric ward for me. I am blue in the face from arguing that Germany is out for blood and land again—France’s and ours.”
“I am sorry about the duke—Sunny—and the new threat to peaceful times,” I told him, putting a hand on his shoulder. Clemmie just shook her head as if she had had enough of all this nonstop German raving.
He put his free hand over mine, though that seemed to have blue paint on it. “I will tell Sunny that you said that and meant it,” he said with a sniff as he put his brush down on the easel tray. He shouted, “You may stop making waves now, Thompson! Come get one of these damned cigars as thanks!
“The thing is,” he said, turning again to face me, “Sunny still misses you, especially after the debacle with—with his second marriage. Well, all water over the milldam now. Time marches on, and death waits for no man, which is what is scaring me about Hitler and the return of the Huns.”
His voice broke, and a tear streaked down his cheek. Clemmie put her arm around his ample waist. Pressing his lips hard together, he nodded at me, then flashed me that V sign of his that meant valor or some such. I made the same sign back and hurried inside to find Jacques.
EIGHTEEN MONTHS AFTER my mother died, Bert telephoned me at Saint-Georges-Motel to tell me the duke was dead of cancer at age sixty-two. He raised his voice so I could hear and was almost shouting.
“I know you will not come for the funeral, Mother, but please come soon after—to Blenheim. I need you here, at least for a little while. Of course Jacques is welcome too—always. Besides, your little namesake needs you to talk her out of fearing the ghost, since we will mostly live here now with the boon and the burden of Blenheim.”
“Of course we will come,” I promised. Tears stung my eyes. I tried to keep my voice steady. “Blenheim will be different now that you are duke, in good and beautiful ways. After the service, when things calm down a bit, including the newspaper coverage, of course we will come.”
“There is one other thing. Needless to say, there were several commemorations in the papers as well as the formal obituary. Lord Castlerosse wrote a memorial in the Sunday Express, which was terribly critical and cruel, but that is such a sensational rag. Winston wrote for the Times something about your marriage, saying it was unhappy and unsuccessful, but that both Father and ‘his first wife, had amazing gifts of charm and kindliness.’ I want you to know I love you, and I believe Father, in his own way, did too.”
“I will thank Winston later for his kind words and I cherish yours, my dear, so let us just say that. You do not need to mend bridges for your father.”
“Righto. Well, of course Ivor misses you, obsessed with his art collecting as he is.”
“I am glad you called me with the news, however sad,” I told him as tears slipped down my cheeks. “I am proud of the new duke and my firstborn son.”
I guess I was crying audibly now, for he said, “I cried too. For all he should have done, could have been. But the water terraces here will be his legacy.”
A name and a past writ in water, I thought as I replaced the receiver. One man passed, one era past, and a new one begun.
I started to walk away, but just leaned against the wall. My knees began to shake, all of me. Whatever Marlborough—Sunny—had not been to me, he had been the father of my beloved children. He had given me the opportunity to reach outside myself to his dear people, so that I could be to them their “Angel of Woodstock.” Poor man, never truly happy, clinging to a past way of life. A difficult first marriage and pitiful second one: I could almost forgive him now that I had someone to truly love, someone who loved me.
Poor man, going soon to dust among the long line of dukes he so venerated who had once held Blenheim. But I had hopes for our Bert’s leadership, hopes for the dear people there whom I would always love and cherish in my memory and heart.