Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  Her heartbreak.

  12. Smaller Castles

  From the hovels of the Lower East Side, Edith and Newton often traveled north by train to Shadow Brook, the immense Berkshires cottage of Newton’s parents. During one of these visits, on a fall morning in 1899, sixty-one-year-old Anson rode out on a favorite mount. The horse had been unruly and giving the grooms trouble. The indomitable Anson took the beast out anyway, trusting his own superb horsemanship to bring it into line. Alongside him rode his daughter, Newton’s sister Carrie.

  Nothing could be sweeter than a Berkshires autumn morning. In the distance, the rise and fall of the blue-backed mountains. The lake, a thin strip of silver below. Behind them on the hill, the hulking hundred-room Shadow Brook itself. Anson, still thinking himself a young man in the full vigor of life, was doing the glorious work of wrestling a steed into submission by sheer strength of character. He was on his own estate. Carrie, there to admire him, rode prettily alongside. What could go wrong?

  For the rest of their lives, Newton and Edith would remember the boot: Anson’s riding shoe, filled with blood like some Civil War general’s when they brought the crippled man in from his accident. The horse had pitched Anson off, slamming him hard, legs-first, into the jagged branches of a pine. The family quickly summoned a surgeon from his own cottage two miles away, but only one of Anson’s mangled legs could be saved.

  Newton spared Edith the gruesome ceremony, but brought his younger brother Graham along, back into the woods above the house, to bury their father’s amputated limb. Over the next several months, Anson convalesced and recovered. (He would not die until 1913; Helen outlived him.) The next spring he attempted to pick up his old life, training himself to stay erect in the saddle with the use of only one leg. He had elaborate mechanical gates installed on the Shadow Brook riding trails, so he could proceed from one section of his property to the next without having to dismount.

  It proved too much. The thrill of the ride, pounding through the glens above the lake, racing over stream courses, proving himself over and over the master of his realm, all that had vanished. Anson discovered himself quite suddenly old. The time had come to retrench, refit, move on. Shadow Brook, massive, eccentric Shadow Brook, was only five years old and already discarded by its owners.

  Anson approached Newton. Could the dutiful son please build his father and mother a new palace, perhaps near the son’s Round Hill property in Greenwich, on the shore of the Sound? Maybe the old man could no longer ride as he once could. But he was still a yachtsman. Long Island Sound was one vast, sail-dotted playground, so reminiscent of the big stretches of blue ocean off Staten Island. It would be like going home.

  FOR HIS NEW estate, in 1902 Anson purchased nine acres at Collender’s Point, in Noroton, Connecticut, the site formerly owned by America’s first pool table magnate, Hugh W. Collender. Money was not a consideration, after the sale of Shadow Brook and Anson’s successes in the banking industry. There, on the shore of the Sound, the intact son delivered to the one-legged father the soberly monikered Brick House, a castle slightly smaller than Shadow Brook. The grand façades of Georgian red were set off by awnings of white and green stripes that deeply shaded the windows, the whole effect suggesting a sense of reclaimed privacy after the public display of the Berkshires cottage.

  At privacy they did not succeed. Brick House became a celebrated success. With Anson and Helen summering at Birch Island in the Adirondacks, Andrew Carnegie and family rented Brick House for the season. “The yacht will be within hailing distance all the time,” wrote Carnegie’s wife, Louise, “and I expect we will be on the water as much as on land this summer.”

  Off the water, an interior built for a king—or a Carnegie. The ground floor had the requisite suite of activity-designated spaces, including a smoking room and a billiard room. Under the red-shingled roof, Newton installed a full-size attic squash court. In between lay two floors’ worth of bedrooms (one for Anson and Helen, six for visiting children), a boudoir for Helen, a study for Anson, a sewing room, seven maids’ rooms and a nurse’s room. Relegated to the basement were the kitchens, laundry facilities and a formidably stocked wine cellar.

  Brick House offered the novelty of a dozen up-to-date bathrooms, a feature that helped measure the distances in the life of Newton Stokes: at Collender’s Point, one privy per person. Forty miles to the south, in Manhattan, the novice architect spent his energy on the Tenement House Commission advocating for the necessity of at least one single hallway bathroom on each floor of multifamily residences.

  On the grounds of Brick House, Newton laid out a splendid set of greenhouses, with a grand palm court and dedicated quarters for orchids, carnations and chrysanthemums. The official magazine of the emerging house-proud demographic, American Homes and Gardens, ran a glowing feature on Newton’s house design, gushing over its parquet floors, leaded glass windows and columns of Vermont marble. The young architect displayed his increasing appetite for painstaking detail by thoroughly vetting the magazine article before publication.

  With Helen and Anson installed in their new mansion on the Sound, the whole Stokes clan had slowly come together, all in houses along a favored stretch of Connecticut coastline. It was similar to the concentration of Minturns in the city, around Gramercy Park. Newton’s brother Anson bought and enlarged the old Pierpont House at New Haven; Mildred and her husband bought a farm at South Salem, near Ridgefield; Carrie and her husband, Robert, came to live at Highland Farm on the road to New Canaan; and Sarah would lease a well-known estate at Norwalk. By the time Newton and Edith were in their early thirties, the Stokes clan owned a linked chain of mansion estates, stones along the green necklace of the shore.

  Together, but never again the same. The patriarch of the family would no longer be the forceful, larger-than-life figure he had been before losing his leg. The mansion at the tip of windy Collender’s Point seemed remote, cut off. Anson wandered the Brick House grounds, a much-diminished ghost. Newton appealed to his brother Anson Junior: “Please spend some time with father on the yacht, as he is very lonely.” Newton did what he could, too, helping his father prepare for a lecture he would give at the New York Yacht Club in 1903, featuring “a hundred twenty-six stereopticon views.”

  It’s a common story, a family drawing in on itself, circling the wagons as the parents age and one generation passes into the next. But the tight circle of the Stokes family was about to receive an uncommon stranger into its midst, someone who challenged its notions of privacy, measured its commitment to progressive ideals and generally shook up the status quo most delightfully.

  A junkman’s daughter from Cleveland named Rose Pastor acted as the poster girl for socialism in the early years of the twentieth century, a younger, prettier version of the anarchist eminence Emma Goldman. In 1905, “Red Rose” Pastor became Newton and Edith’s new sister-in-law.

  JAMES GRAHAM PHELPS Stokes collected an M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons but never practiced, the siren call of progressive causes proving more alluring than medicine. He did graduate work in political science and began blasting off opinion pieces and letters to the editor. He embodied the younger-sibling persona in the family, shrugging off the authority of his older brother, determined to go his own way yet keeping an anxious, yearning eye on Newton at the same time. Graham, he was called. Newton designed the Settlement House headquarters, Graham moved in as a resident teacher. Newton made careful models of tenements, Graham taught a naked exercise class. Anything you can do, I can do better—or at least more outlandishly.

  The whole Settlement House phenomenon, with upper-class altruists sharing the lives of lower-class immigrants, caused a great deal of merriment in New York City’s popular press. Graham Stokes, clean-shaven and earnest where his brother was bearded and reserved, gave the reporters something to write about. Class mixing, coed socializing, socialist rhetoric: Settlement House resembled a radical sideshow, with blue bloods such as Graham Stokes one of the
main draws. Noted one gossip columnist about Settlement House shenanigans: “Not even the dinner party among the smart set at Newport last summer, when a trained monkey was the guest of honor, aroused more interest.” It was a romantic venue for more than one Stokes: sister Carrie fell in love with the Settlement House manager, Robert Hunter, and the two married in 1903.

  Rose Pastor possessed impeccable proletarian credentials. Russian-born, she was first and foremost a member of the working class, having spent twelve years on the floor of a cigar factory in Cleveland. Her immigrant father was a junkman in that city’s thriving recovered-metals trade. Rose first came to the attention of New York’s progressive intelligentsia by writing accounts of her life as a working girl—the pitiful wages, the pitiless bosses, the solidarity of her coworkers. Like Graham, Rose was an inveterate writer of letters to the editor, and her missives caught the eye of an editor at New York’s Jewish Daily News.

  Soon enough, the News invited the young auburn-haired firebrand to come to Manhattan and take a paid position as a staff writer, practicing serious journalism as well as publishing poems and sketches and the advice column “Just Between Ourselves,” all for the grand sum of fifteen dollars per week. Rose immediately took up the offer, and moved with her parents to New York, to a thriving Jewish neighborhood centered along Webster Avenue in the Bronx.

  Inevitably, Red Rose gravitated to the scene at Settlement House. Inevitably, Graham gravitated to Rose. They took tea together in the resident quarters on the Settlement House’s top floor, the inner sanctum for the genteel volunteers. Graham’s invitation to Rose broke an unwritten rule: no immigrants upstairs.

  From the start, Rose’s vision of Graham was flavored with idealism. He was, she later recalled, something like a young Abe Lincoln in his features. She profiled Graham in the Jewish Daily News: “One glance at his face and you feel that Mr. Stokes loves humanity for its own sake and as he speaks on with the sincerity which is the keynote of his character, you feel how the whole heart and soul of the man is filled with ‘welt schmerz.’”

  Their Settlement House tea was followed by a stay at a mutual friend’s summer retreat in Quebec, the same St. Lawrence River environs where Newton proposed to Edith. Graham wooed Rose with what passed for pillow talk among the progressives of the day. He had first sought to study medicine, he told her, “because he wanted to help the people,” but soon discovered that “all diseases have their roots in social causes.” Such sentiments sealed their desire. They decided to wed.

  News of the engagement stirred the Manhattan social scene. “J.G.P. Stokes to Wed Young Jewess,” announced the New York Times. “Proud of Ghetto Pride” was the formulation of the Philadelphia Record. The popular press treated Rose as equal parts Cinderella and Mother Teresa, an instant celebrity with soulful eyes and pre-Raphaelite tresses. Her newspaper writing received prominent treatment, complete with laudatory sidebars on her shtetl–to–Settlement House background. For a brief moment, she was as famous as any woman in America.

  The groom accepted the attention manfully. “To call ourselves engaged would be to belittle our relations,” Graham primly told reporters. “An engagement implies two persons. We are already one.”

  What must Edith have made of Rose? How must Helen or Susanna have seen her? Whatever the private truth, in public the family’s stiff upper lip held firm. Aunts Olivia and Caroline fussed about Graham’s relationship with an “Israelitish maiden,” but the official face of the family was Newton’s youngest brother, Anson, by this time Reverend Anson Phelps Stokes, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in New Haven. With Newton, Edith, Anson Senior and Helen standing mute behind him, Reverend Stokes met the gentlemen of the press. “Rose Pastor is a noble woman and has done noble work,” Anson said. “The family is very much pleased with the match. It is an ideal one in all respects.”

  Two hundred guests descended on Brick House for the wedding of the summer, the crowd heavily flavored with a Lower East Side contingent. The bride’s side of the aisle, Cleveland-born and Bronx-come, overdressed and uncomfortable, made for a toothsome contrast with the starchier groom’s side. It is remarkable that the wedding party, like the relationship between Red Rose and Pale Graham, did not explode from its own inherent contradictions. For their honeymoon in Europe (Paris, Geneva, Scotland, Budapest), Mother Stokes provided the socialist all-star couple with a Packard touring car and chauffeur.

  Family commissions represented a major part of Newton’s career; he had long served as the in-house architect for the extended Stokes clan. For his brother Graham, he designed a retreat on a scrap of land called Waites Island, which floated just off the Connecticut coast, near Stamford. Newton negotiated the deal, and Helen Stokes stepped forward in 1905 to secure a contract for Graham’s home away from home. So the island took its place amid the family holdings along the Connecticut shoreline. Rose and Graham, leading lights of the left, remained within Edith and Newton’s upscale orbit.

  Typically, the inspiration for renaming the island came from Rose. Caritas, Latin for “charity,” had a profusion of wildflowers, shade trees stippling its four dreamy acres and a crescent of golden sand beach looking out on the Sound. In the middle of it all perched Newton’s creation, a sprawling, two-story manor house with plenty of space for visitors.

  Newton could easily oversee the construction, since he and Edith lived just down the road in Greenwich, on their own chunk of prime beachfront acreage. The wood-shingled walls of Rose and Graham’s house were classic beach architecture. Inside, guests had their pick of eleven bedrooms and could relax in front of a huge fireplace two steps down from the living room. The whole affair was subtle but luxurious, with floors of herringbone oak and marble skirting and a library with a cathedral ceiling. Politicos and bohemians were soon making pilgrimages to Rose and Graham’s pleasant island home. A narrow, gated causeway was the only access to the mainland. On the shore, five sailboats stood waiting to take the serious thinkers out on the water for some serious diversion. The author and firebrand Maxim Gorky, in America to raise funds for the Russian revolutionaries, found a soft place to land at Caritas on the Fourth of July, 1906, direct from Bloody Sunday and the insurrection of 1905.

  When Rose and Graham grew lonely on the island, they had Newton design a guesthouse of rustic stone and invited their close friends to move in permanently. A photo of the time shows Rose winsomely posed, lying on her stomach, on the lush lawn overlooking an arc of shoreline, holding a crystal globe in her hands, her angel hair flowing down her back.

  Somehow the contradiction between leftist ideals and the comfortable Caritas idyll did not interfere with either. Graham and Rose would become increasingly radicalized, leaving behind the tame precincts of the Settlement House for membership in the Socialist Party of America. For years they barnstormed the country as husband-and-wife agitators, always to return to Caritas.

  IN 1906, SUSANNA cabled New York from London, where she was sojourning, to inform Newton and Edith of a discovery rife with possibility. “A well-known old English country family,” she wrote, needed a place to permanently settle their fourth daughter, a child who was then just a year old. It must have sounded strange, and it wouldn’t seem less strange when the particulars were known, but the notion was irresistible.

  The very names of the principals were perfect, reeking as they did of the British gentry. Raj Lieutenant Colonel Maldion Byron Bicknell, Royal Regiment of Artillery. His wife, Mildred Bax-Ironside. The couple lived in the lieutenant colonel’s station at Dum Dum, Bengal, a place too hot, too disease-ridden, too foreign to properly raise children. Bicknell and Bax-Ironside kept producing babies with no place to put them.

  The wife’s maiden sister, Helen Maud Bax-Ironside, had already taken three of the couple’s girls into her home, Herendon House, Tenterden, Kent. She could not possibly take a fourth. This lost little girl, Susanna stated in her telegram to Edith and Newton, might well be “a happy solution of your problem.”

  The baby’s giv
en name, too, seemed significant. Helen, the same as Newton’s mother. The stars appeared aligned. At age thirty-nine, her hair showing some gray, Edith would finally become a mother.

  13. Pretty Manners

  At the dawn of the twentieth century, adoption remained an uneasy choice, at least for a conventional woman. Formalizing adoptive kinship in court was quite uncommon, though it had long been accepted behind closed doors. The practice, sometimes termed “placing out,” had a slightly disreputable tinge. The orphan trains of the Children’s Aid Society were still running, sweeping tens of thousands of neglected urchins off the urban streets of the Northeast, delivering them to various forms of servitude in the West. The unscrupulous institution of the “baby farm” thrived in England and the United States as an underground purveyor of infants, trafficking babies from desperate single mothers for lump-sum payments from equally desperate adoptive parents. (Mary Pickford’s silent film Sparrows would later dramatize the trade.) All these practices had their roots in desperate poverty.

  But by 1906, when Susanna Minturn made her problem-solving proposal, the concept of “sentimental adoption” had begun to make inroads in the popular imagination. The idea embraced the value of children as children, rather than as miniature adults or solely economic contributors to the family. It was a novel idea, more likely to be favored by Progressive Era idealists such as Edith and Newton. A stubborn stigma attached itself to raising a child who did not share blood kinship. Sentimental adoption challenged age-old prejudices. It brought a stranger to the family hearth, but the ensuing intimacy was welcome.

  To the new way of thinking, adoption represented something quintessentially modern and fundamentally American. It spoke to a sense of generosity and exemplified a brisk, rational rejection of the ancient cult of blood ties. A companionate marriage like that of Edith and Newton, with its ethos of mutuality and consensus, was by its nature intentional. Their relationship represented a perfect match for the very intentional evolution of parenthood that came with sentimental adoption.