New England Gothic
William Stewart
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AS I PACK up what are, metaphysically speaking, the last remains of my distant relative-in-law Gerald Chittenden, in anticipation of sending them off to the prestigious New England boarding school where he taught, I find myself reflecting on the long shadow that he cast, and on the circumstances by which his papers came into my hands.
For me, the story begins with Mr. Chittenden’s wife. She and my maternal grandmother were second cousins, and had a warm friendship that extended beyond the ties of familial regard. When my grandmother was widowed and left with an only child—my mother—on the eve of the depression, the Chittendens began inviting the pair to come for extended visits to their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, initiating a connection that my mother honored, albeit with some ambivalence, throughout her lifetime, which I now want to memorialize as well.
The Chittendens had two daughters: Bertie, born in 1922, and Julie, two years younger. Birth order sometimes pushes an older sibling to take the lead, but in this case the pattern was reversed, since Bertie was developmentally disabled. Her cerebral palsy, which impacted her cognitive capacity as well as her balance and coordination, was caused by brain injury at birth. The damage was likely related to the polio that her mother had contracted some years before, which had left her partially crippled and which undoubtedly colored her subliminal feelings about Bertie’s condition and needs.
Because of all this, from an early age Julie was expected to be her sister’s keeper. This situation, I believe, shaped the family dynamic in incalculable ways, and triggered a sense of burden and shame that was all the more corrosive for being unacknowledged. For the Chittendens were, if nothing else, determinedly “old school,” and in their world, such things simply were not talked about.
“Old school”—it’s a curious phrase, not exactly a class descriptor, yet it encapsulates the Chittenden family heritage more succinctly than any other term that I can think of. It certainly fits with Gerald Chittenden’s professional life, since for the bulk of it he taught English at St. Paul’s, one of New England’s most exclusive prep schools, which especially in his day could be viewed as the very embodiment of the type. Back then, the school was all-male, thoroughly Episcopalian, and drew its student body almost entirely from the eastern elite—and Gerald Chittenden was right at home in that milieu. He began working there in 1912, and stayed until retirement in 1948, becoming the epitome of the witty, condescending, punctilious schoolmaster along the way.
I have no reason to doubt that he was a good teacher, or that he and his wife were appreciated at St. Paul’s over the years. Going through his papers, I have found abundant tributes expressing gratitude for his skill in the classroom, and equally, for the nurturance of the family’s afternoon teas, where Mrs. Chittenden offered a welcome counterbalance to the School’s overwhelmingly masculine atmosphere.
Gerald Chittenden was not only an educator; he was a man of letters par excellence. He authored a handful of novels, as well as many essays and short stories that appeared in a variety of periodicals. He loved to guide readers in what he considered edifying directions, and his dream for retirement was to have a little bookshop on Martha’s Vineyard, where he could arbitrate and moralize to his heart’s content. By the time my young life intersected with his, this had come to pass: the Borrowdale Bookshop, located in a remodeled woodshed adjoining the family home on a back street in the village of Edgartown, soon acquired a reputation that far exceeded its geographical confines, known widely for the firm opinions of its proprietor and the gracious hospitality of his wife.
Brought into the presence of these august personages, I was always on best behavior, following my mother’s lead in calling them Uncle Gerry and Aunt Peg. They were relations of a sort, but also archetypes in my young mind, embodying a world both intriguing and remote. My mother, I know, felt real affection for Aunt Peg, and I appreciated her grandmotherly kindness towards me as well; but Uncle Gerry was the éminence grise, the patriarch of Borrowdale, patronizing to my mother and inscrutable to me.
Those were the names I used then, but as I try to put their story into written form, I find that I think of them as Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden—a reversal of the usual pattern, where those whom we once knew as Mr. and Mrs. Such-and-such, mere cardboard cutouts in our childish lives, acquire first names and develop three-dimensional personalities as we grow into adulthood. But they were so anachronistic even in their lifetimes, and the epilogue to their story turned out to be so grim, that it’s hard for me to remember that they were flesh-and-blood people, and not characters in some New England Gothic cautionary tale. There was so much that was never fully recognized: class privilege, gender bias, self-righteousness, and the question of how such attitudes might impact two daughters, one retarded and the other notably maladjusted even then, growing up in a mid-century America that they were given no tools to cope with.
So, how to find a balance—to respect what was admirable, yet also do justice to its shadow side? I’ll pick up the thread with some of my earliest memories, and then proceed from there.
* * *
LET US BEGIN with afternoon tea, that most Chittendonian of rituals. In my mind’s eye I see old Mr. Chittenden in his low and enveloping chair, holding forth on some subject or other, family and guests dutifully attending or attempting repartee, according to inclination and circumstance. There was good humor, to be sure, but it was based on assumptions that could be egregious: when my mother introduced her fiancé, then a Harvard Ph.D. candidate in mathematics, Uncle Gerry jovially commented (as she told me many years later), “ah, a rude mechanical, then!” No doubt this riff on Shakespeare was intended as a joke, but it reveals the assumption of superiority that pervaded the household and its master.
My mother used to say that he was the most pompous person she had ever known—not that she was a particularly lenient judge of character, but even for her, this was unusually harsh. She often recalled his grand pronouncements, for instance at the Sunday family picnic suppers (always at Chappaquiddick East Beach, always with black bean soup), where he would moisten a finger and hold it to the air, then solemnly announce the direction of the wind—and invariably get it wrong.
Nor could she find much to appreciate in Julie, who was already ill-at-ease in the world, even when they were girls together. Looking back on those days, my mother remembered a child prone to strange obsessions alternating with lethargy and stubbornness, a pattern that would only grow stronger as she reached chronological if not emotional adulthood. To some extent, I think her inability to navigate consensus reality was just a part of who she was; but surely some of the blame should be assigned to that martinet father of hers, who burdened her with expectations she could never live up to, frustrating her at every turn.
From adolescence onward, she emulated him as much as possible, but alas, the deck was stacked against her. For one thing, she had been born female; she tried to compensate as best she could, developing a persona not so much mannish as ungendered, but it never quite measured up in her father’s Kiplingesque world, where women were a tiresome distraction from the real business of life. And somewhere deep in her bones, along with unconscious resentment, there developed an uneasy sense that it was true—that she was, indeed, irredeemably tainted, damned from the outset by reason of her sex.
Then, too, there was the bookshop: there was never any question but that she’d take the helm eventually, when her turn came. Never mind that she had no aptitude for it, that maybe, in an alternate world, she might have found something she’d have actually liked to do; she never had any choice in the matter, Daddy had worked it all out, and the mandate was no less absolute for being unspoken.
Most damaging of all, though—so everyone agreed, who talked it over in whispered tones, years after the harm had been done—most damaging of all was the injunction laid upon her, from an unconscionably early age, that she must never marry, but devote her life to the care of her sister. Not that she would have married in any case, but still, it’s a cruel thing to burden a child with, and while she honored it as best she could, it was at the expense of a life of her own. It makes me sad: how different everything might have been if she had been able to grope her way to some rough-and-tumble lesbian tribe, some tight nest of late-1940’s bulldykes, where she could have found a place among kindred spirits—not an easy life, to be sure, but at least she wouldn’t have half-choked on bilious latter-day Victorian proprieties, then lived out her days in the wretched vomitus of that ill-digested meal.
* * *
OF COURSE, JULIE’S downward spiral lay far ahead in those days of cucumber sandwiches and literary discourse, but her awkwardness was striking even then. She echoed her father’s inflections eagerly, but she was hopeless with the niceties that mattered so much in the Chittenden home, being more comfortable on a sailboat than in a drawing-room. In fact it was her sister Bertie who inherited their mother’s grace, and it was only sad that the family conversation had to be so elevated, because if it had been more down-to-earth, Bertie would have been better able to hold her own.
As it was, she mostly sat on the sidelines, waiting for a question to be addressed to her, when she would brighten up and respond appropriately. Her composure was hard-won, but after many years of specialized schooling in the best institutions available, she had developed considerable poise in addition to her basic good nature, and was altogether a more sympathetic person than Julie, whose enthusiasms and crackpot ideas could be distinctly unnerving.
I have a memory of being taken for a drive, sandwiched between the two sisters in Julie’s ancient automobile. This was a pre-war relic with no back seat, just a two-person passenger compartment and then an enormous trunk. I remember straddling the yard-long gearshift that rose up from the floor between my knees; I must have been very young indeed, because we stayed with the Chittendens only a couple of times in my childhood before my parents found a summer place of their own. I don’t recall the destination of the trip, but I’m going to speculate that we were headed to Lambert’s Cove.
Because Julie had a friend there, whose name was Ellen. This was important: a relationship that wasn’t mediated by her parents. Having retreated to the Vineyard after college, lacking the psychic means to create an autonomous life for herself and saddled with the expectation that she would always look after her sister, Julie was largely in thrall to the demands of pedigree, but here, at least, was one connection that she’d forged on her own.
And Ellen was a free spirit. Although she, too, lived beneath the familial roof, she was far more independent-minded than Julie was, and more self-accepting as well. While not exactly lesbian-identified, she nevertheless wore her dykey manner more comfortably than Julie did, and even in the Eisenhower years of oppressive gender conformity, delighted in following her own distinctive muse.
Nor did her domestic life bear much resemblance to the forced atmosphere of the Chittenden home. Ellen’s mother, Mary Stokes, was a warm and lively person whose cheerful good humor belied her history, which included a decade of forced immobility in her teens and early twenties due to scarlet fever, as well as a marriage that ended with her alcoholic husband’s suicide. When her older daughter Ellen moved back to Martha’s Vineyard after a few years of post-college jobs on the mainland, the two of them—one turning thirty, the other turning seventy—formed a happy if unconventional dyad, connected by shared creativity, imagination, and an ever-ready delight in the absurd.
They lived in an old farmhouse on a freshwater pond, less than half a mile from the beach at Lambert’s Cove, on the Island’s north shore. This place was so remote from Edgartown, in the elder Chittendens’ narrow view, that one practically had to strap on extra gas tanks to get there, never mind that it was barely fifteen miles away. Obviously the distance was as much psychic as physical, and for both Julie and Bertie, the Stokes house became a precious retreat where they could let down their guard as they never could at home.
I know this from both sides, because within a few years I was a regular at that house myself. When my parents had told the Chittendens that they’d like to find a summer rental in some rural part of the Vineyard away from Edgartown, Julie replied that her friend Ellen had a camp for rent, and was seeking tenants for the following year. A visit was arranged, my parents liked what they saw, and that’s why I’m here today—because after they had rented for a couple of summers, the Stewarts and the Stokeses developed a friendship beyond their connection through the Chittendens, and Ellen let it be known that she would be willing to sell. She was looking for buyers that she’d want to have as neighbors across the pond, and evidently my parents qualified, since the transaction was completed in the year that I turned seven. By then I was already bonded with Ellen, and also with her mother, who ultimately became what I can only call a spirit-grandmother to me.
* * *
OBVIOUSLY IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to know, but I can’t help wondering how Julie’s life would have unfolded if Ellen hadn’t died just two years later, at the age of thirty-five. Her death from multiple sclerosis was a grievous blow to her mother, of course, but equally to Julie, who lost her strongest link to any reality outside the family circle. It was also the first death that registered in my childish consciousness, and I felt her absence keenly.
I identified a lot with Ellen, and in some mysterious sense, I felt like I’d come to take her place in her mother’s life. Whether or not Mary experienced our relationship similarly I can’t say, but if nothing else, I expect she enjoyed having a youngster across the pond who would paddle over a few times a week to share ideas and laughs. Certainly our intimacy grew as I went through my high school and college years, and she entrusted many private thoughts to me, not least about the Chittendens and how their story had evolved.
Mary was thoughtful and compassionate, but there was nothing saccharine about her, and her insight could be tart when provoked by hypocrisy or pretension. She saw no excuse for how the Chittendens had raised their daughters: she used to say that Bertie would have been better off in a bricklayer’s family (back when there was a viable working class, and such an idea would have made sense), where she would have made her way as just another neighborhood kid, albeit a little slow, instead of being both over-protected and under-engaged as she was in her own home. She also felt that Julie had been hoodwinked into internalizing her parents’ guilt, and she lamented that Ellen’s death had cut short the one escape route that might have been available to her.
There was never much sympathy between Mary Stokes and Gerald Chittenden. She considered him puffed-up and tiresome, and would occasionally summarize one of his conversational set-pieces as “how I won the war in Texas.” It’s true that he had been the commander of a pilots’ training base outside of Austin in World War One, and presumably his contribution was unexceptionable, but I can well believe that his exposition of it may have been somewhat overblown.
Indeed, over the years I became acquainted with a number of people on the Vineyard who had none too high a regard for the “sage of Borrowdale.” One tough old dame whom I saw for the last time when she was in her late nineties, who’d worked with him on the board of the local historical society and later tried to help Julie with the bookshop, roused herself from the fog of age in response to my diplomatic question and declared firmly, “Old Mr. Chittenden? He was a so-and-so!” This from someone who had herself been a rock-ribbed conservative all her life, too—but there was something in his manner that could rub people the wrong way, especially strong-minded people, and especially women.
Naturally, evidence of Gerald Chittenden’s gender prejudice is absent from the materials relating to his life at St. Paul’s School, an environment created by and for boys and men. Nor is there much recognition of the class privilege underlying the ethos he purveyed, since the people he had dealings with were all products of the same elite, and social superiority was simply a given. But as I review his story, I see how his assumptions—common enough in his place and time, but exemplified almost to the point of parody in him—could cause deep if invisible harm.
On the other hand, that same conservatism led him to principled stands against what he saw as wrong, often in defiance of public opinion. No socialist, he nevertheless inveighed against capitalist greed, and during the red scares of the late forties and early fifties he set up an “Anti-McCarthy Table” at his bookshop, in protest against the era’s pervasive climate of fear. As president of the Island’s Historical Society, he oversaw preservation of the historic Fresnel lens that had been in the Gay Head Lighthouse for almost a century, when the Coast Guard was preparing to scrap it in the course of converting the light to electricity—I found his personal correspondence with Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. on the subject, and of course it was cordial, almost chummy, being from one patrician to another. Manner aside, his preservationist instincts sometimes seem downright prescient: in a letter to the editor of the Vineyard Gazette, dated 1934, he suggests that the Island should strive for sustainability with respect to locally produced food.
His conservatism, in other words, cut both ways: it was both dismissive and conscientious. When I consider his views, they seem so unlike my own that our opposing perspectives occasionally converge at opposite ends of the spectrum, closing the circle so to speak. Paradoxically, for all his snobbery, intransigence, and righteousness, he sometimes stumbled upon wisdom. At their best, his attitudes inspired Julie to think outside the box; unfortunately, more often than not, they also confined her within it.
* * *
MR. CHITTENDEN DIED in 1962, his wife in the following year. For the next decade or so, Julie kept the bookshop limping along, always with reverence for “what Daddy and Mummy would do,” even if she didn’t do it. She enjoyed being around books, but had no inclination or patience for running a business—her mother had handled that department, dutiful helpmeet that she was, and Julie had never bothered to learn. Indeed, she had a deep aversion to paperwork of any sort, and people who had been coming in for years found their orders neglected or their charge accounts incorrectly billed. Gradually they drifted away, frustrated by Julie’s incompetence: many of them had become regulars on account of the personalities of its founders (the grand oracle up front, the factotum-hostess in the rear, or some combination of the two), and Julie had neither the incisiveness of the one nor the charm and reliability of the other to keep them coming back.
There was another reason for the loss of clientele: most of the Island’s younger residents and visitors, who hadn’t known the senior Chittendens, were unaware of the shop’s existence. There was no advertising, the location was hard to find, and an increasingly reclusive Julie failed to maintain her parents’ network of connection, so there was nothing to bring new people in. Those few that stumbled across it found a sorry sight: a dark little cave of a place, the shelves understocked and disorganized, the books largely out of date and warping from the damp, the owner either absent altogether or belatedly emerging from the house, barefoot and in tattered khakis held up by a piece of rope, summoned by the bell. Even without the advent of a new bookstore on Vineyard Haven’s Main Street in the mid-seventies, Borrowdale would have been done for, a casualty of Julie’s unerring penchant for self-sabotage.
At first, I saw this downward slide only once or twice a summer, when I accompanied my mother on her dreaded duty calls. She went out of genuine affection for Bertie, but she found Julie hard to take, and their relationship was always strained. I, on the other hand, felt considerable kinship with my idiosyncratic cousin, and was fascinated by the Victorian furnishings and musty aura that filled the house and shop. As a maladjusted queer teenager without friends of my own age, I felt at home in Julie’s decaying world, and she, in turn, responded to my fecund imagination without judgment or restraint.
I started finding ways to get to Edgartown on my own, hitch-hiking or riding my bicycle and relying on Julie’s kindness to get me back to Lambert’s Cove—because, for all her faults, Julie was boundlessly generous to those she cared for, and would think nothing of putting my bike into the back of the old Jeep that she’d inherited from Ellen and making the hour-long round trip to drive me home. We would sit in the cluttered parlor, or at the dining table covered with unopened bills and overflowing ashtrays, and I would spin fantasies for hours, as we consumed endless quantities of Hu-Kwa tea and cigarettes.
Ah yes, cigarettes. A prodigious smoker herself, Julie knew better than to encourage me in the habit, but once I made it clear that I was hooked, tobacco became something of a shared vice, as we conspiratorially delighted in being bad together. I shudder now, remembering the ubiquitous ashes and reeking atmosphere, but at the time, it represented freedom.
And here I must give her credit—not so much for letting me smoke, but rather, for accepting me so unreservedly. At home, at school, I was always conscious of being watched—with concern for my well-being, to be sure, but also with anxiety about my social awkwardness, my incipient homosexuality, my eccentricity. But with Julie, I felt free—not only from potentially critical observation, but more importantly, from the self-judgment that I had internalized, which was far harsher than anything I experienced from my worried but loving parents. And so, while Borrowdale was in many ways an unhealthy environment for an impressionable adolescent, I found a kind of support there too, and I’m grateful.
Somewhere along the way I began officially working at the bookshop, though this was always a bit of a canard, since we were both adept procrastinators. But I enjoyed arranging books and practicing my calligraphy in the ledger, and I saw to it that the bills got paid, which was more than Julie by herself could do. I started imagining myself as an old family retainer, especially after I’d gotten my driver’s license and Julie loaned me the Jeep for the summer (having bought herself a Land Rover, the first of several decisions that eventually reduced her to penury)—and over time, without any conscious decision, I came to see my future as linked to Borrowdale’s.
Meanwhile, thanks to Julie’s one consistently honored familial obligation, Bertie’s routine changed little. Every winter she went off to the school she’d attended as a girl, and then in late spring she’d return to Edgartown, eager to once again be in, or on, the salt water. She was a strong swimmer, and especially loved to go out on her sailfish (basically, a sailing surfboard), which was beached at a nearby coastal pond at the end of a quiet lane. Julie would drop her off after lunch, leaving her alone—there were always familiar folks around to keep an eye on her and offer help if needed—and she would stay till late afternoon, walking the mile or so back home with the sail furled up on her shoulder, pleased with her independence. To be sure, I could tell that the chaos around the house sometimes troubled her, but at home she kept busy as her mother and her teachers had instructed, writing letters to relatives and school chums, walking down Main Street to the post office with the dog (always a Scottie, by family tradition), and going to church on Sundays, mostly by herself now that her parents were dead and Julie had stopped going.
The cost of Bertie’s schooling—and indeed, of all the household’s expenses, since the bookshop barely paid for itself—was covered by a trust which had been set up by Mrs. Chittenden for her daughters’ benefit. The trustees were two: Julie, and the family man of business, a long-ago St. Paul’s student and tea-time regular whom I shall call Mr. J. DeVere Bronson, a name with an aura similar to that of his actual one. Although Mr. Bronson was justifiably skeptical about Julie’s financial competence, the trust agreement gave her a decision-making authority that she exercised to calamitous effect. While recognizing the need to keep some of the portfolio intact so that Bertie could keep going back to school, she was ready to reach deep into capital in pursuit of her own conceits.
* * *
HER MOST SPECTACULAR expenditure came a couple of years after I started at the shop, when to fulfill a lifelong dream she commissioned construction of a classic wooden sailboat, a 22-foot gaff-rigged sloop. She moved to Maine for the winter, leaving the house and shop to incompetent and opportunistic friends, and returned triumphantly at Avior’s helm the following June. Alas, while acquisition of this treasure had been a great adventure, routine maintenance was not, and within a few years the boat was high and dry in Borrowdale’s backyard, awaiting the care that her skipper could never quite manage to provide her. There she sat, slowly rotting, a sad metaphor for Julie herself.
Of the people who entered Julie’s life around this time, none was more problematic than a young man that she got to know because he was the son of her long-suffering housecleaner. A sometime merchant seaman with a fondness for the bottle, he soon took up residence at Borrowdale, nominally paying rent but mostly just making himself at home. By now Julie was in significantly reduced circumstances as a result of her extravagance, and when her boarder suggested that they start a taxi operation, using Julie’s Volkswagen (the Land Rover having joined the boat in the backyard), she readily went along with the idea. Undeterred by the discovery that taxis must be licensed, they simply changed direction a bit, and that was how the Ace Errand Service was born. A few ancient former bookshop patrons were glad enough to get prescriptions fetched, and occasionally (illegally) to be chauffeured to doctors or hair appointments too, but the business was hardly a success, especially since Julie (like Mr. Toad) had smash-up after smash-up, until eventually her driver’s license was revoked. Luckily the accidents were all low-speed, and caused no bodily harm, but when at last she found herself without license or co-proprietor, she discovered that most of her remaining assets had disappeared as well.
My relationship with this deteriorating scene was erratic: I knew that my involvement was unwise, but at the same time, I fantasized about reclaiming it. After graduating from college, I came back to the family summer house in Lambert’s Cove and commuted to Edgartown in the rusty jeep, trying to keep the bookshop limping through one more summer, while Julie and her Svengali ran errands around town. Ignoring my mother’s understandable uneasiness, I was determined to spend the winter on the Vineyard: I would stay in the little house until the danger of frozen pipes outweighed the pleasures of being a pot-smoking hermit by the pond, whereupon I would move to Borrowdale. With Julie’s taxi-partner off at sea, upon arrival I began imposing my vision of Chittendonian style right away, pushing the piles of junk to the far end of the dining table, beyond the light of the candles I insisted on, and serving beef bourguignon or sole amandine instead of the TV dinners that had become the household’s standard fare. Afternoon tea was once again in china cups, at least until Julie knocked over the tea table and they went crashing to the floor. I even pulled off a shabby-elegant Victorian Christmas, inviting my reluctant parents and clearing out a guest room that had been given over to random detritus a decade or so before. My goal was to be some mix of major-domo and heir apparent, and—fearful of risk and growth as I then was—I told myself that I could make a life of it.
True, Julie’s fondness for rum-and-water had reached disturbing proportions, but I tried to ignore it, and for the most part, I was able to. My precarious self-deception lasted until mid-winter, when one evening, looking to summon her for dinner, I found her asleep on the toilet after eating a pound of tootsie rolls. With that, my scaffolding of denial collapsed, and I knew that I had to get out.
With the arrival of spring, I moved back to Lambert’s Cove and went to work at a local inn, effectively severing relations with Borrowdale. I was blessed with a timeless season of closeness with Mary Stokes, radiant on the cusp of ninety, but that transcendent moment came to an end when her surviving daughter came to fetch her away for the winter, as the days drew down towards solstice-tide. I closed up the little house on Seth’s Pond and went looking for a real job in Boston, notifying Julie of my decision as a fait accompli. A few months later, I got word that Mary had died peacefully in her sleep, and with that milestone my first Vineyard chapter came to an end.
* * *
THUS IT WAS that I missed the most melodramatic phase of the Chittenden saga, during what I think of as the rabbit years. But I followed the plot from a distance, because my mother continued to arrange for visits with Bertie, and would relay her growing apprehensiveness to me. Sometimes she would cut out and send me newspaper clippings about Julie’s escapades, and would glean further information from occasional anxious phone calls with other distant relatives when the situation took a particularly outlandish turn.
The chapter began, ironically enough, with a book: specifically, with Watership Down, a novel in which the protagonists—shrewd, heroic, and wise—are rabbits. As was typical of Julie when she got fired up about something, she went full steam ahead without constraint, and the consequences were predictably messy. She decided that rabbits were the hope of the world, or some such thing, and of course it would be inconceivable to confine them. On August 17, 1976, under the headline “Rabbits Warrant Drastic Action,” the Vineyard Gazette reported that there were sixty-three of them in the house, uncaged, as revealed at a hearing of the Board of Health. The Board’s agent described the dwelling as “filthy, with garbage all over,” and in a surreal touch, said that while Julie had promised to build one cage per night (a laughable thought, given her incompetence with tools), “he questioned whether this rate would be sufficiently rapid to keep up with the growing population.”
Not surprisingly, it wasn’t. Despite the Board’s order that she get rid of the creatures, a couple of years later they (or their descendants) still had the run of the place, according to the next piece in my file. Here it was reported that, in addition to animal feces and a large electric heater with a badly frayed cord, the authorities discovered that the house had neither working toilets nor hot water. To this concern, Julie protested that she couldn’t afford to repair the systems in question, and claimed that she was being unfairly singled out since there were other people in town who lived without such amenities (perhaps true, but presumably they would at least have had outhouses).
This time, the observations in question were made by the police. They had entered the house with a warrant for her arrest, issued for her repeated failure to appear in court on motor vehicle charges dating back several years. Giving no thought to the impression it might make, she proceeded to write a letter to the Selectmen, complaining about her treatment at the hand of the law. With a flourish that her father might have applauded if the context had not been so grotesque, she stated that when she went to get dressed in order to accompany the officers to the station, “they did not stay put as they should have done, but instead slithered around the house, poking their noses into everything, evidently to satisfy their vagrant and jaundiced curiosity.” Then, magnificently: “Surely the town owes me protection against such lawless and irresponsible invasions.”
* * *
BECAUSE I HAD absented myself from the scene, I was blessedly uninvolved with the process by which Julie and Bertie were finally extracted from the Edgartown house and installed in a new home in the backwoods of working-class Oak Bluffs. But what I saw before and after makes me confident that there was no exaggeration in the gruesome descriptions I later heard, of truckloads of rotting furniture going to the dump, gallons of disinfectant being used to wash down walls and floors, and a couple of selfless cousins (out of twenty or more, most of whom had washed their hands of the entire mess) desperately strategizing how to sell the house and find enough money so that one of them, a kindly soul who’d opted for carpentry instead of suburban self-aggrandizement, could build a basic cabin for the two weird sisters on the plot of scruffy land they’d bought for the purpose.
In the end, Julie made her peace with the plan, though at one point she’d wanted to move to a remote corner of Chilmark instead. At that juncture, when Cousin Nina had pointed out that the location would be impractical without a driver’s license, she responded in all seriousness, “oh, that won’t be a problem—I shall have a donkey.” But eventually, she accepted the lifeboat constructed for her benefit, and came to find merit in the design of the new house, with its sitting and eating areas focused on a wood stove, and its two modest bedrooms flanking the central core, one at each end.
Of course, the building’s shipshape practicality was soon flooded with overflowing ashtrays, foul dog blankets, mounds of books and papers, and other miscellaneous junk, but no matter—at least they had a roof over their heads, which was no small thing under the circumstances. True, they were now, ironically enough, dependent on taxis for transportation, but this didn’t trouble Julie too much, virtual hermit that she had become. Nutrition, however, suffered: with trips to the market now complicated, costly, and rare, the fresh meat and vegetables she felt duty-bound to purchase mostly ended up rotting because of her failure to cook them, and even the sorry staples—junk bread, cheap jelly, and not much else—were often in short supply.
The move was particularly hard on Bertie, since she was now deprived of the daily walks around Edgartown where casual social interaction had provided a reassuring routine. Julie’s idea of compensation—to read aloud from books that Bertie couldn’t really follow—was surely a trial for her, but there was still the dog to walk, as well as the needs of whatever other creatures they were sheltering that year to take care of, and gradually an unsteady equilibrium emerged. Most importantly, she still had school to look forward to, where she had friends and a structured daily schedule, and could swim in an indoor pool to her heart’s content.
One other stable point of reference in her calendar came every spring, when my parents would host her for a week’s stay at their winter home in Providence. These visits were the consequence of my mother’s loyalty and compassion: she had resolutely kept her distance from the drama surrounding the Edgartown house, but she still wanted to give Bertie the experience of a calm and reasonable household, if only once a year. Of course this meant negotiating transportation and schedules with Julie, but she dutifully made it happen, most often right after Bertie’s term at school. She did her best to create a welcoming environment for her childhood chum, and saved up her worries about the sisters’ domestic chaos until she could confide them to me.
By this time I had settled in San Francisco, and was pursuing a life quite unrelated to my Vineyard past. The Chittendens were far from my mind except when my mother needed to unburden herself, so I was taken aback when, out of the blue, a card from Julie arrived in the mail. It was an amazing thing, that card—not only because I’d heard nothing from her since I’d fled from Borrowdale a decade earlier, but even more remarkably, because I knew it had been years before that since she’d last initiated communication with anyone. Looking back on it, I’m struck by how starved for friendship she must have been, to have made that overture; but I was too intent on building a different reality, and couldn’t—or at any rate, didn’t—respond.
* * *
MEANWHILE, BACK ON the Vineyard, the two mismatched sisters shuffled along, getting older and stranger all the time. Trying to do the right thing, once or twice a week Julie would hire a taxi to chauffeur Bertie into town for a hot lunch at the local diner, accompanying her from time to time in order to pay the bill. I still encounter people who shake their heads ruefully, remembering the pair of them coming in—the crazy one and the retarded one, dislocated, disheveled, and oddly, poignantly, brave.
I tremble to think how this story might have ended, were it not for a chance encounter in that diner, which happened one day when Julie and Bertie had settled in for lunch. Linda Martello (to give her a name congruent with the one she actually bore) was a youngish woman who was working part-time at the grill, when Julie overheard her mentioning to a fellow-employee that she was looking for house cleaning jobs to make ends meet. Julie, drawn to Linda’s kindly manner and knowing that their rustic cabin was about to collapse beneath the weight of its accumulated debris, asked Linda whether she would be willing to come help them out, although they would only be able to afford a couple of hours a week. Linda agreed, and took it as a challenge when, after their departure, her employer said that she wouldn’t be able to stand it, since it was widely known that they lived in disgusting squalor. “But isn’t that the point of being a house-cleaner?” she asked me rhetorically years later. “That you clean their house? And here were these two old sisters with no one looking after them, so of course I was going to help.”
Even for someone as accepting as Linda, though, the level of filth was a challenge. For the first few months, she said, she did little except throw away rotten food and other trash, taking it off to the dump by the carload. Her endurance was remarkable, but even more remarkable was that she was permitted to keep coming back. She had just the right mix of qualities—sympathy, earthy good humor, a non-judgmental attitude—to slip past Julie’s defenses and be allowed in, whereas the one or two others who’d previously offered had merely provoked hostility and distrust. Like the feral creature she had become, Julie was always ready to bite an unfamiliar hand, but somehow this newcomer made her feel safe, and she responded gratefully. Seeing how desperate they actually were, Linda started spending more and more time with “the girls,” overlooking the financial sacrifice and effectively adopting them out of the goodness of her heart. She quickly formed a tight-knit bond with Bertie, and before long was setting up craft-type activities and taking her to the beach, in addition to cooking and cleaning for the both of them.
This new relationship was a piece of remarkable good fortune for the sisters, especially since by this time almost none of the old ties were left. My mother died in 1991, and while my father dutifully notified Julie and kept up her regular Christmas present (Hu-Kwa tea, smoky aftertaste of a vanished world), all other connection between the families faded away. Even as I felt the need to spend more time at the house on Seth’s Pond—my father being disinclined to visit without my mother, and happy for me as the only child to take over in his stead—I still couldn’t quite bring myself to see my wayward cousins, though I knew I had unfinished karmic business on the Island, of which the Chittenden thread was part. After all, my life’s ambition in childhood had been to become an eccentric old man on Martha’s Vineyard, and sooner or later, I would need to find out what that was all about.
It took me a couple of years before I was ready to leave San Francisco, but in due course I settled into the family cottage, intent on exploring the mythic Vineyard of my memory. Inevitably, my path led me back to the Chittendens. It was because of the Chittendens that my mother first came to the Island, and because of them that my parents found this little house where I write these words today. It was thanks to the Chittenden connection that I got close to Ellen and then to Mary Stokes, my spirit-guardian who still occasionally visits me in dreams. And it was from this archetypal matrix that I became a steward of personal history, committed to acknowledging the past and ritually closing the circle.
Even so, being in touch with Julie was the last thing I wanted to do. But my sense of obligation was strong, both to renew my mother’s family loyalty, and also to make amends for having run away—since for all her craziness, Julie had always supported me, and I had abandoned her. I dreaded the thought of having her back in my life, but I felt like a shirker avoiding it, and finally I picked up the phone.
* * *
IT WAS EXCRUCIATING. It was as though I had never been away. There’s nothing to forgive, she said, good heavens no—that old upper-class New England accent, all snorts and brays and whinnying British vowels—and when will you come for tea? I got directions, drove through the depressing subdivision, identified the ancient cart track, and eventually found the house, hidden at the end of an unmarked turn-off that I missed when I first passed it, so little did it resemble the driveway of a human habitation.
My first impression was that she had become the de-sexed salt-water equivalent of a mountain man. Living alone in Bertie’s absence, far from the proprieties of a long-ago Edgartown, she seemed to have gone native somehow, like a formerly captive animal gone to earth. The mess was as total as ever (this was before Linda’s influence took hold), and her appearance—all uncombed tufts and Audenesque wrinkles—was thoroughly uncouth, but to a markedly greater degree than before, she seemed accepting, or at least, reconciled to her fate.
Remarkably, she had given up smoking. I heard the emphysema the minute I walked in, well before she mentioned it, but cigarettes had been such a part of her for all those years that I could hardly believe the unequivocal evidence I saw, telling me that she’d quit. And alcohol? No sign of the rum bottle that had been so prominent a feature of those years I’d worked in the bookshop, and my gut told me that she’d probably stopped drinking too.
She was also suffering from malnutrition. That much was clear from her scarecrow frame, and from the woeful state of the kitchen, out of which she nevertheless managed to produce two cups of tea and two slices of Wonder bread, smeared with margarine. Watching, standing by, attempting to make conversation, it was all I could do not to take over her clumsy preparations or run away screaming, but I held myself back, and eventually we had our tea.
Taking my leave as soon as I decently could, I headed for my car, and noticed two or three dead Volkswagen buses in the underbrush. They had served, I later learned, as storage spaces during the move, filled up with old books which inevitably mildewed into spongy dankness from exposure to the humid coastal air. I rather think that Julie herself may have spent a few months in one of those microbuses, while the house was being built and Bertie was off at school—but I may be wrong, since I wasn’t around at the time, and I’m a little uncertain about how things unfolded. However I do know that a lot of books saw a lot of weather out there, because it was I who had to deal with them in the end.
During our first winter of renewed contact, I visited Julie every few weeks, when my conscience wouldn’t let me postpone it any longer. I usually found her huddled by the woodstove, wearing filthy pajamas and her father’s overcoat; and while many of her tropes were familiar, she seemed no longer so deeply in thrall to—that is to say, in rebellion against—the conventions of a bygone age. The demon-images I remembered from Borrowdale, collected by ancestors in exotic lands in the days of colonial empires, still looked down from walls and shelves through decades’ worth of grime and dust, but their scowls seemed less fearsome now, and the ghosts of her parents held a little less sway.
Even so, her life was clearly pretty thin: sometimes I would take a tub of stew to warm up and eat with her, just to make sure she got fed. But I was relieved to learn about Linda, though she couldn’t have been coming for very long at that point, since her presence hadn’t made much of an impact as yet.
But over time that changed, as Julie’s trust grew and as Linda’s kindness led her to take on more and more. For at least one season, she and her common-law husband actually had Bertie come live with them, so that Linda could provide nurturance full-time. Bertie was thrilled that with Linda’s help she could once again get to the beach, which she hadn’t been able to do for years, and was equally happy just to tag along for errands or to work on crafts projects by herself when Linda went off on cleaning jobs. Nor were Julie’s needs neglected: it was the rare day that Linda didn’t drop by with Bertie in tow, attending to domestic chores along with animal grooming, house-fluffing, and socializing.
As part of their deepening closeness, at some point Linda introduced the sisters to her partner Russ, a builder and would-be entrepreneur with whom she’d been living for several years. Though he struck many, including me, as distinctly shady, Julie took a liking to him because he played chess, with a fair-to-middling aptitude comparable to her own. Whatever his less attractive characteristics may have been, he was courteous towards Julie and Bertie, and they warmed to him not only as their caregiver’s spouse, but also as a friendly visitor who could fix the occasional leaky faucet or rotting window-sill.
* * *
GIVEN HOW THINGS had evolved, Julie was naturally shaken when she learned that Linda and Russ were about to lose their rental home after their landlord defaulted on his mortgage. With affordable rentals almost unavailable on the Vineyard, it seemed likely that they would have to leave the Island, and Julie, in turn, was faced with the end of the support system that she and Bertie had grown accustomed to.
The first notion to emerge out of this crisis was that Julie would subdivide her property and give half of it to Linda and Russ to build on, in exchange for which the sisters would get care for life. It soon became clear, though, that subdivision was impossible, on account of the conservation restriction that Julie had put on the land at the time of purchase. So they moved to the next idea, which was that Russ would build a second dwelling on the undivided parcel, where he and Linda would live.
With this amorphous concept agreed to, but with none of the planning actually underway, the parties came up with a supposedly stop-gap arrangement to serve until the new structure could be built. Linda would sleep on the living-room couch, while Russ would get a corner of the woodshed, curtained off for token privacy. Soon, on top of Julie’s residual mess, there came a flood of plastic tubs and milk crates, haphazardly filled with clothing, felting squares, gadgets, squeaky-toys, toiletries, and the tools of Russ’s construction trade. To Bertie’s delight, a couple of high-spirited cats also quickly made themselves at home, joining the incontinent old Chittenden Scottie and a few miscellaneous birds and hamsters as part of the improbable household.
Russ may have been polite to his hosts, but he was thoroughly unreliable. He would dream up far-fetched schemes in order to make a quick buck, and then, when they backfired or failed to materialize due to impracticality and absence of follow-through, would lash out at whoever he imagined was hindering him. He was also an erratic builder: he was full of grandiose ideas, but didn’t have the competence or consistency to bring them off, and he lacked the organizational skills to run a successful business.
To be fair, throughout the time that he was involved with the Chittendens, he was dealing with chronic back pain, which undoubtedly made a bad situation worse. He had already undergone major surgery, with indifferent success, and was relying on large quantities of pain-killers just to get through the day. (Rumor had it that he was also dealing drugs on the side, though I have no idea whether this was true.) In any case, whatever natural tendencies towards anger and resentment he may originally have had, they could hardly have been diminished by constant pain and heavy medication.
Russ’s moodiness notwithstanding, the house was now a hive of cheerful activity, quite unlike the desolate burrow of previous years. I found it odd to see Julie, raised in patrician snobbery and thoroughly disdainful of popular culture, now surrounded by the trappings of blue-collar America—the wide-screen television always on in the background, the “feminine touches” incongruously grafted onto the unfinished surfaces. But I wasn’t about to pass judgment, since the people who introduced these things also gave me reason to hope that I wouldn’t end up with sole responsibility for the Chittenden ménage in the absence of anyone else. True, I was the only relative living on the Island, and almost the only one who hadn’t abandoned the sisters to their fate; but with the bonds of the foursome growing deeper all the time, and with Linda and Russ anticipating a home of their own in exchange for the care that Linda seemed genuinely happy to provide, I was grateful that a workable arrangement seemed to be in place.
There was still no written contract, however, and the need for one became more pressing when Bertie broke her hip. Henceforward school would be out of the question, because she could no longer walk without assistance, and would require full-time help. Linda was up for the task, but since she would have to forego all other income sources, it became clear even to these feckless folk, who recoiled from officialdom in any form, that legal agreements were needed.
I can’t say whether the plan to transfer ownership of the undivided property to Linda and Russ was already part of the conversation before Bertie broke her hip, nor do I know who came up with the idea in the first place. It certainly wouldn’t have been out of character for Russ to insinuate the thought into Julie’s mind in hopes of finding a way out of his credit woes, but Julie could equally well have made the offer unprompted, given her generous impulses and her desire to secure the future for Bertie and herself. In any case, regardless of who suggested the arrangement and when, it wouldn’t in itself be enough; Linda would also need a regular stipend, which would require the consent of the investment adviser Mr. Bronson, and of Cousin Nina as well.
The reason for this was that the trust set up for the sisters’ benefit was no longer under Julie’s control. After the wooden boat fiasco and the meltdown at Borrowdale, she had been persuaded to resign her position as trustee so that Mr. Bronson could appoint Nina in her place. Though understandably less than thrilled to assume the position, Nina had agreed because, having overseen the sale of the Edgartown house and the purchase of the land in Oak Bluffs, she knew how utterly incompetent Julie was, and also recognized that there was no one else who would be willing and able to take on the job. Once she was on board, Mr. Bronson had been able to stabilize the portfolio while also providing for the sisters’ basic needs. Now, however, Julie would have to approach the trustees about a salary for Linda, entailing an additional monthly expense.
I was away from the Vineyard while these arrangements were being negotiated, so I don’t know the details, but when I returned, everything was settled. There was a formal life-care agreement, and title to the property had been turned over to Russ and Linda, with a life estate for the sisters until the death of whichever one outlived the other. For a moment, it almost seemed like things were stable.
Once the documents were signed, Russ was eager to move ahead with the construction project. Since he hadn’t done his research, he was predictably aggrieved when he discovered that the relevant zoning codes only permitted one residence per lot—but, not to be stymied, he came up with an alternative plan, proposing a large “addition” joined to the existing house by a passageway. This new structure was to be the core of the hybrid dwelling, containing shared common space as well as private quarters for him and Linda, while the original cottage would become the sisters’ bedroom wing.
Eventually, after a couple of false starts, the plan was approved. Russ’s first move was to cut a hole in the wall and cover it with plastic, in anticipation of connecting the old area with the new. Next, he brought in heavy equipment and dug a huge pit for the basement of the new wing, piling up the excavated dirt in a small mountain to one side. And then, work ceased. There things stood, untouched, for a couple of years at least.
The stated reason for the delay—though probably not the only one—was Russ’s health. He experienced a sudden deterioration in his back, and then, on top of that, a heart attack: not a terribly severe one, but still, enough to keep him off the job. To suggest that financial mismanagement may have been a factor is not to deny the reality of his medical troubles, even if, as evidence suggested, his behavior would have been problematic regardless of the circumstances. Construction didn’t resume until a grown son of Linda’s appeared on the scene, at loose ends after being released from jail for some minor offense, and made himself available to help. I don’t know whether he got paid for his efforts, nor do I recall where he slept—in a tent? in the woodshed with Russ?—but he went to work on the new house under Russ’s direction, and gradually it started to take shape.
* * *
MEANWHILE, JULIE HAD grown increasingly frail, and her breathing had deteriorated badly. I clearly remember her low-key, almost apologetic tone when she told me about her diagnosis: “it seems that I have cancer.” I couldn’t feel particularly sad, but at the same time, I was disarmed and impressed by her matter-of-fact acknowledgment of incipient mortality.
It was then that she asked me to be her executor. I agreed, on the condition that I be given access to whatever information I might need in order to understand the situation in its totality. This granted, I started to piece together a picture of how things stood, and discovered an alarming fact: Bertie had no legal guardian. Obviously the parents, and then Julie, had been de facto guardians, but none of them had ever seen fit to get this formalized—I suppose because they felt that it would be beneath their dignity to draw the state’s attention to such a private matter, or perhaps they just never thought of it, taking it for granted that one of them would always be around.
I told Julie that in light of her diagnosis I believed it was essential to remedy this, and she concurred, asking me to take it on because, as a Vineyard resident, I would be well positioned to keep an eye on things—and also because, as Linda often reminded me, “you were always her favorite.” Not wanting to shoulder this responsibility alone, I suggested that Nina should become co-guardian, so that I would have a partner with authority in the financial realm. Julie saw my point, and soon thereafter, Nina came to the Vineyard so that she and I could meet, and so that the three of us could discuss things face-to-face.
Conscientious and sensible as well as familiar with the overall picture, Nina immediately struck me as someone who would make an ideal ally for dealing with the Chittenden muddle. Though her reserve and concern for transparency rubbed Linda and Russ the wrong way, I was grateful when she agreed to join me in applying for Bertie’s guardianship, not least because the very fastidiousness that annoyed the householders would allow me to focus on the human dimension, while she, from a distance, could play the “bad cop,” imposing rules which could be plausibly attributed to Mr. Bronson. Meanwhile I would make sure that Bertie and Linda were content, which would include humoring Russ.
I knew that I would be dealing with personality issues, but I didn’t anticipate the complications that Mr. Bronson’s involvement would bring. If Nina was concerned about the pressures of the situation, Mr. Bronson was choleric about them. When I wrote him to introduce myself, and to say that in the process of applying for guardianship I foresaw new expenses which would have to be covered by the trust, he replied in a long, tendentious letter that he’d kept the Chittenden portfolio afloat against all odds for forty years, thank you very much, and wasn’t about to accede to what he considered unreasonable demands.
Julie died within a year of her diagnosis, before the guardianship issue could be resolved. To our attorney’s dismay, the judge assigned to hear our case didn’t approve it outright, but instead ordered an investigation into Bertie’s mental state, which both delayed the process and substantially increased our costs. As we expected, our request was ultimately granted, but not before we were hit with the investigator’s fees—$300 an hour, plus hefty travel expenses from the mainland—as if we, and not the authorities, stood to benefit from Bertie being kept out of the state care system. Naturally our lawyer, while outraged at a maneuver that he suspected was a political payoff, submitted an extra bill as well, which also had to be forwarded to the trust for payment.
Meanwhile, Nina and I had met with Linda and Russ to get a clearer picture of Bertie’s expenses. Linda made a strong case that the $500 monthly allowance stipulated in the life-care agreement had become inadequate for Bertie’s needs, and Nina and I were persuaded that it needed to be increased. She was clearly struggling financially, even as she remained lavish with her time and love.
Unfortunately, while Linda’s caregiving was beyond reproach, the same could not be said of her record-keeping. (Indeed, the disdain that she and Russ evinced towards such matters was part of why Julie had felt comfortable with them in the first place.) When Nina asked for a tally of expenditures, Russ angrily charged us with disrespect, and it took all our diplomacy to calm him down. Meanwhile, after a search, a defensive Linda finally located a plastic bag containing some crumpled-up receipts and other random scraps of paper, which she handed over with uncharacteristic bad grace. I would have foregone the entire exercise in order to keep the peace, but for Nina, who had to deal with Mr. Bronson, a viable paper trail would have been a powerful piece of evidence, and its absence was unhelpful to say the least.
Mr. Bronson could hardly refuse to cover the costs of the guardianship petition, but his convictions—both about the management of the trust, and about Linda and Russ personally—led him to vehemently deny our request. From his perch in the Hudson Valley, whither he had retired from his investment business in Boston, he wrote:
“After many years of overdrafts, I am determined not to return to paying out more than the trust takes in. I am quite sure that the generosity we have shown is beyond what any ordinary Boston trustee would ever have considered. We are already handing over more than is called for by the terms of our agreement, and I do not intend to make further concessions which would require us to pay out principal. As you know, I am deeply suspicious of Cacciotti”—he could never bring himself to use Russ’s first name—“and his influence over his wife, if that’s what she is. They see the trust as a cash cow to be milked for their benefit. They have the house and land, they have the income from the trust, and now they want the capital too. We do not need to do it, and we should not do it. Who knows, anything could happen—Bertie might require expensive hospitalization, the Cacciottis might go off to the South Seas!”
Aside from its uncanny echoes of old Mr. Chittenden’s bluff hauteur, this letter was aggravating because of its refusal to recognize what seemed obvious to Nina and me, namely that appeasing Linda and Russ was now the only alternative. I wrote back, pointing out that nursing home care—to which we would have to resort if the relationship with Linda disintegrated—would be not only hugely disruptive for Bertie, but far more costly than the status quo as well. For her part, Nina cobbled together a list of expenses, using the few available receipts combined with a lot of guesswork, and eventually Mr. Bronson gave way, writing to Nina: “I firmly disapprove of the continuing blackmail of the trust by these predatory people, but I suppose they have got you over a barrel. I cannot in good conscience accede to your request, but I am too old to argue about it. Therefore, I will not make objection if in your capacity as co-trustee, you put in the order, so that I have nothing to do with it. This is the only way that I am willing to go along.”
* * *
NOW, HAD MR. BRONSON’S principles been the only complicating factor in the equation, things might have settled down, but there was Russ to be dealt with as well. A more archetypal contrast would be hard to imagine: on the one hand, the fastidious old blue-blooded banker, class prejudice dripping from every pore; and on the other, the bullying, bungling working-class scammer, digging himself into an ever-deepening hole through his own incompetence. Reconciling these two extremes seemed like an impossible assignment, but I felt that I needed to do my best, since Bertie’s well-being hung in the balance.
The new wing had at last been roughed in, and Russ and Linda were living amid the sawhorses and paint cans, when one day I went over to check up on Bertie and to look for some papers that would help me finish up Julie’s back taxes (she had failed to file for the last few years, and as her executor I needed to clean up the mess). Linda made tea for me and Bertie—Russ would never take part in such a feminine activity—but when we were done he appeared and announced that they had decided to sell the Vineyard property and move to New Hampshire. His back, he said, required surgery and follow-up therapy that he couldn’t get here, and with the proceeds of the Vineyard house, they would be able to buy something significantly better in a less expensive real estate market, with a swimming pool which would be great for him and for Bertie too.
Stunned, I tried to make sense of this latest bombshell: what about the construction project, what about Bertie’s life estate, what about all the agreements so laboriously worked out that would now have to be revisited? No problem, said Russ, I’ve got it all figured out. He dragged me to his computer and started showing me photos of all the glorious properties he’d been looking at, talking as if it were already a done deal.
I left, shaking my head and quaking in my boots. A series of tense exchanges ensued, with letters going back and forth, largely at cross-purposes to one another. From Russ: “I didn’t want this, it was put on my plate. I’m tuffenuff [sic] and I suck up pain 24/7, but I need hi-tech hospitals and I’m not willing to get on the boat every day for my treatments. There is a uniform answer to make everyone happy. Real estate is 3x cheaper in New Hampshire and we won’t have mortgage payments. We will give Bertie 1/3 ownership, a generous compensation compared to her being paid off here soon. We’re keeping our promise to Julie 110%. Once she gets a physical visit I know she’ll be okay with it. Having a pool will make her feel better—become more mobile—it will become very high on her list of favorite things.”
I wrote a carefully-worded reply, recognizing the first-rate care provided to Bertie by Linda and the bonds of affection between them, as well as the legitimate challenges posed by Russ’s health problems, but also pointing out that in addition to the legal complications, the impact on Bertie would need to be considered. In response, Russ opted for bluster: “Your idea about not changing things for Bertie is just plain wrong. Previous to us the girls were living in total squalor and 75% of the Island knows this. Now she is in the new house with heat, clean clothes, three squares, and 57" hi-definition TV with surround sound. In New Hampshire she’ll get everything she has now, plus a pool. The legal papers don’t have to be complicated or expensive, a one-page addendum will do. Your perspective on everything related to this deal is out of focus and unrealistic. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s a duck.”
Unpleasant though this was, I kept visiting in order to maintain friendly relations, and as time went on, I noticed Bertie becoming increasingly comfortable with the prospect of the move. Of course this could be construed as the result of undue influence, but what mattered to me were Bertie’s actual feelings, not what triggered them, and it was clear that her attitude towards the idea was now a positive one. Also, there was another factor leading me to look more favorably on the plan: they now wanted to settle in the area where Bertie had grown up, near St. Paul’s, which was home to many of Linda’s relatives whom Bertie had met and liked. More than once, Linda had driven the two of them up to stay with her married daughter for extended visits and special events, where Bertie had been much fussed over, and I could see how the social life of a sprawling, easy-going family could be of real benefit to her.
Some time earlier, with Nina’s approval, I had hired a lawyer specializing in guardianships to help us with the complexities of our situation. Now, as the person on the ground, I informed Nina and our attorney of my inclination to go along with what Russ and Linda were in any case determined to do, provided that we could secure Bertie’s legal interests. Luckily, Mr. Bronson wouldn’t have to be brought in on this decision, since the life care agreement wouldn’t be affected, and Bertie’s life estate in the property—the only other financial entanglement—was under the control of the guardianship, not the trust. Still, we were daunted by the prospect of transferring the guardianship, health insurance, and other location-based covenants from Massachusetts to New Hampshire, until we realized that we could change Bertie’s address so that henceforth she would officially live with me. While legally dubious, this strategy would allow us to bypass the change-of-state issues, and we figured we could probably get away with it because the odds of being challenged were slim.
* * *
SOMEWHERE IN THE midst of all this, Russ let it drop that he had declared bankruptcy and that the Vineyard property was being foreclosed on. So familiar by now was Russ’s mismanagement that this latest fiasco hardly even registered: I was already feeling swamped by the weight of the Chittenden patrimony. Not surprisingly—indeed, appropriately, but still vexatiously—Linda had asked me to take charge of all the old papers, books, broken-down furniture, and bric-a-brac that Julie had brought with her from the Edgartown house. Soon, I found myself on hands and knees in a dank and spider-filled crawl-space, into which several dozen cartons of decaying books had been piled up in disarray, presumably transferred from those rusting Volkswagen buses now lost in the scruffy woods. Day after day, I lugged them through the basement, up the ill-constructed stairs, around the outside of the house, and into Julie’s old bedroom, which became my staging area.
There, abstractedly working through the dust and mold, I pondered the convolutions of fate that had led me to this moment. I wanted to be respectful of these leavings of the dead, but at the same time, I felt the need for vigilance, lest I be claimed by them. Even if there were some of these books that I might be glad to have, some of the small percentage that weren’t so blackened and toxic that they could only be sent to the dump—where would I put them, living in a tiny cottage that was already overflowing with keepsakes of the past? Had I returned to Martha’s Vineyard only to commune with ghosts, my own life no less hollow than my cousin Julie’s—or so it felt just then, within that musty room—and would I, too, suffocate in the sloughed-off drift of years?
Such a meditation on the vanity of human endeavor! So many once-fine leather bindings, rotted and turning to powder in my hands; so many elegant ancestral signatures and high-flown inscriptions, testimony to libraries lovingly assembled and passed on through generations; so many authors I’ve never heard of, their collected works in sets of ten, twenty, thirty matching volumes, tossed onto the trash heap if they’re too far gone, or at best, sent to the library book sale where maybe, just maybe, someone will rescue them—but I doubt it: who would want the novels of Charles Reade, sixteen volumes, 1886? From my biographical dictionary, itself a fine example of high-flown literary style: “Not one of the great nineteenth-century English novelists, but of the second order, he is perhaps the best.”
Shaking myself from my melancholy, I went back to the tasks at hand. I hired a man with a pick-up truck to take the ruined books off to the dump, and paid him for two one-ton loads. I sold some of the better ones to a dealer, giving the proceeds to Linda for expenses so that we could avoid pleading with Mr. Bronson yet again. I brought home boxes filled with old manuscripts and letters, diaries and invoices and other miscellaneous papers, and shoved them under my bed for sorting “later.” I gave bookshop ledgers and memorabilia to the historical society, and took Mr. Chittenden’s ancient bookshop chair to be restored. I filled out change-of-address forms, filed taxes, talked with Nina and our lawyer, managed the guardianship checking account, reported finances as required by the court, and prayed that it would all be over soon.
* * *
OF COURSE, HAVING forfeited the Vineyard property to the bank, Russ had no resources for his dream house, and the trio ended up in an undistinguished rental instead. But I knew that Bertie would be well cared for, which was all that mattered as far as I was concerned. Given the new configuration, I welcomed Nina’s offer to go look in on them, and her subsequent report that Bertie was adjusting well.
Once they were gone, I never expected to drive down that ill-omened road again, but a few months after my last visit I got a call from the new owner, asking if I wanted to claim a framed print that he’d found behind an unfinished wall. From his description I realized that it was the only thing I had ever really wanted from the Edgartown house, a woodcut portrait of Queen Victoria by the masterful British artist William Nicholson. I had assumed that it was lost, having searched for it during the clean-out without success, so its reappearance felt like a blessing from the universe. It had been given to Julie by Mary Stokes, a couple of years after Ellen died, because she figured that Julie would appreciate it—and now it had come to me.
In the event, Bertie lived for another eight years after Linda and Russ moved her to New Hampshire. I visited her there once, and she seemed happy enough, though Linda told me that she was prone to the occasional panic attack as her breathing capacity diminished. Nina went more often, and saw the trio through yet another move, the cause of which I no longer remember. There were a few more crises over money and accounting, but we were able to navigate them, and compared with previous years, the drama involved was small. Bertie died peacefully in 2010, at the age of eighty-seven, of end-stage pulmonary disease.
Meanwhile, a couple of years after the New Hampshire move, one other tendril from the Chittenden past had unfurled unexpectedly, when I was spending a few days with an old friend in the Hudson Valley. I mentioned Mr. Bronson’s name, since I knew he lived in the area, and was amazed to learn that he and my friend were members of the same church—Episcopalian, naturally—in the quaint little village of Tivoli. A region of ostentatious riverfront palazzos where my friend had found a modest toehold through Bard College connections, this part of Dutchess County had been a favorite getaway destination for nineteenth-century New York aristocrats, and here, Mr. Bronson had returned to the fold.
My friend offered to call him, to see if we could arrange a visit. A couple of days later, we found ourselves on a long carriage drive, sweeping down to what had been a dower house on one of the Astor estates. Mr. Bronson greeted us, and once again I heard that harrumphing upper-class intonation, which I thought had died out along with Pierce-Arrows and dinner-gongs. A mousy wife was introduced, who then scurried off to the kitchen, since we had been invited for lunch and, as Mr. Bronson explained, there was no help that day. We three gents sat in the parlor overlooking the Hudson and drank sherry, as Mr. Bronson regaled us with stories from his schooldays at St. Paul’s, seventy years before. Many of them were about the afternoon teas: “Mrs. Chittenden was a wonderful tea hostess, you know, simply wonderful. She used to serve a kind of, ah, a cookie-like thing, yes, they were cookies with curls of shaved chocolate on top of them, we used to call them nigger-heads. You couldn’t say that nowadays, could you, but that’s what we called them back then, nigger-heads…” Relishing the epithet more than any remembered flavor, he continued blithely, while my friend and I squirmed on our uncomfortable straight-backed chairs. Lunch followed, in the kitchen: a sad little lunch of Campbell’s soup and sandwiches of ham paste spread on thin white bread, followed by canned pears—since, as I’d observed once or twice before when I’d encountered late-stage Old Money, fine taste did not extend to food when no servants were around.
We departed as soon as politeness would permit, controlling our shrieks and groans until we reached the car. Then, on the drive out, my friend told me a story he had heard, about how Mr. Bronson had been interviewed for a documentary about Franklin Roosevelt, whom he had known as a child from visits to the nearby presidential estate at Hyde Park. When questioned about Roosevelt’s concern for the downtrodden during the depression, Mr. Bronson had replied: “Well, you see, when Franklin Roosevelt was at Harvard, he wasn’t admitted into the Porcellian Club, and that’s why he went down the wrong path in life.”
* * *
WHICH BRINGS ME back to where I started—that world of privilege and noblesse oblige that the Chittendens had embodied to perfection. Mr. Bronson had done well by his old schoolmaster: he had handled the family’s modest wealth adroitly, despite Julie’s recklessness, and his stewardship had saved Bertie from destitution in her old age. At the same time, he had perpetuated an outlook of prejudice and disdain, an outlook reinforced over multiple generations and responsible for social and psychic hurt on an epochal scale.
Was this the legacy that old Mr. Chittenden would have wished for? Surely it was not his intent to burden his daughter Julie with a set of attitudes and expectations which, running up against her unruly nature, would lead her to a life of self-consuming frustration and despair. And yet, wasn’t this what had resulted? Going through the contents of those boxes I had pushed under my bed, I found letters from the adolescent girl, writing home from boarding school, eager to describe her odd fixations but also prone to overwhelm in her encounters with the world. I found the didactic essays of her moralizing father, by turns jocular and sanctimonious, and imagined her trying to gain his affection in the face of his withering wit, his rejection of anything that might be considered even remotely sentimental. I looked at endless condolence letters, and saw her set adrift by the deaths of her parents who, for all their restrictiveness, had been her unquestioned moorings. I sifted through evidence of her increasingly disordered mental state—notebooks full of incomprehensible jottings, unopened bills and letters dutifully sent by Bertie once a week from school, and other random scraps of paper, still extant only because they’d never been thrown out. Finally, I pondered the whole trajectory of this archetypal tale: the principled, yet repressive and class-bound start; the harsh reality of mental retardation, compounded by silence and shame; the lack of any heartfelt space for wayward otherness, despite apparent tolerance; and the long, slow disintegration, each episode more bizarre than the one before, until nothing was left but brittle fragments, crumbling at my touch.
With this last dispersal, I put the Chittendens to rest. I have sent whatever might be of interest to the archives at St. Paul’s, and have released the remaining odds and ends to purification in the woodstove. I’m grateful for what I was given, through family heritage and through Julie’s better nature: connection to a place of spirit, a harbor in my youthful confusion, unequivocal acceptance. I’m glad that I could be with Julie in her dying, and could help assure good care for Bertie in her final years. By telling their story, I have completed my service. I bless them, and I let them go.
