Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  That approach struck even the quack-friendly Newton as outlandish. After one month of rest in France, the couple went back to Manhattan. By the beginning of September, massage and osteopathy had Newton back on the tennis court. But the obsession with treasure hunting would not dim.

  Of all the views represented in the developing work, Newton would give special consideration to Saint-Mémin’s Mount Pitt, the image he and Edith had first viewed at Halsey’s house, the one that helped incite the Iconography. For years, he attempted to track down the perfect print of the engraving. When he found it, he authorized an out-of-scale budget in order to replicate its delicate rainbow of tints. He adored the Saint-Mémin, and he wanted nothing less than to see it rendered in all its glory in his book.

  Typically, he also sought to possess a print of the Saint-Mémin for his own collection. Over the years he tried strenuously to trade for the view, one time offering the Hudson Valley historic site Van Cortlandt Manor, which owned a copy, a complete set of presidential autographs in exchange. “You see,” he wrote the curator of the site, “I am very persistent. I cannot bear to give up the print without making another effort to bring about an exchange in which all should be gainers.”

  He came up empty-handed. The Saint-Mémin is gloriously reproduced in the Iconography, but it remained an elusive prize for outright ownership. He would have to rely on memory, recalling that evening with Edith in the home of another collector, when he first laid eyes on the print that would change both of their lives.

  The attraction was not so much aesthetic as it was the access it offered to a chronological experience, an illustration-based form of time travel. Newton attempted an explanation in a passage of his introduction to the Iconography:

  Few of the prints of Old New York can justly be called beautiful, but many possess other qualities which endear them to the heart of the intelligent collector, who regards them almost with reverence and awe as the frail documents of a by-gone age, silent bearers of many a half-read message, which perhaps his alert eye is destined to decipher. In themselves admittedly incomplete and unsatisfying, if judged by the standards of the average picture lover, as contemporary illustrations of successive steps in the physical growth of our great city; they render more real and vivid our written history, and become at once instructive and intensely interesting.

  The lure of the past had its flip side, the urgent sense that the world of Newton’s childhood would drift away unless he somehow managed to moor it. The Iconography was just such a mooring, fragments shored against a city’s ruin, necessarily incomplete and inadequate, but the best he could do. Travels in time, back to the young child he was, when he seized upon the engraving of the view from the Latting Observatory on 42nd Street, or to the day he and Edith brought their runabout to northern Manhattan when all was cornfield, fated to be replaced by faceless apartment buildings.

  Old New York. The three words contained within them a sense of destruction and loss, but also an exquisite remembrance of things past. All his life, Newton would explain later, his dreams of Old New York furnished the “most delightful” of his nighttime imaginings. “I usually start out from some point in the modern city,” he wrote, “and on my way—perhaps to keep an appointment at some other well-known point—I am tempted to try a short-cut, and soon find myself in stranger and impossible surroundings—from the modern point of view. The houses are those with which I am familiar from the prints and other pictures of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, or, almost as often, belong to still earlier times.”

  These oneiric wanderings shimmered with a sense of alienation and strangeness. Of the houses, he recalled, “curiously enough, they are almost never inhabited. Although the streets are sometimes populated, I generally pass unnoticed—apparently unseen!”

  Iconographer as ghost. Nostalgia would forever permeate the Book. Once they took hold, the timeworn ways and venerable structures of Manhattan Island would never again release their grip on Newton’s imagination.

  15. A Fine Object Lesson in Good Construction

  Edith had a choice. She could stand by and watch her husband slowly become a ghost, vanish into the past like a fading photograph, or she could demand his presence in the day-to-day life of the marriage and the family. Of course, she understood the attraction. The past held its magic for her, too. She could lose herself in memories of the days on the beach on Staten Island, or the snow-white ball gowns at the debutante cotillions of her youth. (Could it really have mattered whether or not they were silk?)

  Edith saw the Iconography as a worthy endeavor. But she also recognized it as a rival. She tried to establish limits for Newton, attempting somehow to rein in his obsession, reintroduce a genteel moderation to their lives. But he blew through every law she laid down, whether it had to do with the number of hours he worked or the amount he spent on buying art.

  What is the dynamic of a life that veers at its midpoint from ease and balance—an accomplished curriculum of work, a wonderful marriage, the satisfaction of improving the fortunes of others—in order to fervidly pursue an enterprise that would virtually steal away all of these? Newton’s wife, the person closest to him, could not help but appraise the situation for what it was. Now in his middle forties, Newton had found a grail that he would chase for the next seventeen years, wreaking havoc with any measure by which he could gauge his happiness.

  The only thing she could do was lure him back to their marriage. What could she offer to distract her husband from his obsession? What else but an appeal to his lifelong love of building?

  On Round Hill Road in Greenwich, Newton and Edith had been living in a farmhouse they built themselves in 1901 according to Newton’s design, a six-bedroom cottage with shingle siding of rough cypress, Dutch doors and a very unnecessary but extremely Dutch-style stoop. As unassuming as it was, the domicile featured the omnipresent billiard room and library on the first floor, both prerequisites of to-the-manor-born architecture.

  Edith and Newton had been brought up on the truism that good houses were everything. If the one you occupied didn’t totally satisfy you, you were to go back to the beginning and start again. They now had some disposable income to put toward a new home, since the Manhattan real estate market had rewarded their investments. With Helen no longer a toddler, Edith possessed the leisure to devote to maintaining a proper home. She always enjoyed an outdoor outlet for her energies, whether on Staten Island, at Murray Bay or with the Stokes family at Birch Island. She was hungry for more involvement in a place that was rural, with plenty of farmland and woods around her. A place of her own.

  In 1910, an irresistible opportunity presented itself. Edith and Newton had come across a photograph in the English magazine Country Life of a half-timbered Tudor manor house, built in 1597, that stood in the countryside outside one of England’s oldest towns, Ipswich, in Suffolk. The structure was offered for sale.

  So what if their dream cottage was three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean? The couple requested that Edith’s sister May, who happened to be in England, drop by and inspect the goods. She reported the house to be “charming.” Newton then sent over the chief engineer of his architectural firm, and the man judged the building sound and free of rot. In a homespun English attempt at protecting them, the timbers of the structure had all been covered with thick smears of tar, but that could be easily removed. The engineer considered the place restorable.

  As a municipal improvement, the town of Ipswich had condemned the house and slated it for demolition, a reassurance to Newton, since rescuing it would be an act of preservation. But it was not as if anyone was around to challenge the indulgence of a Stokes importing a vacation home from across the ocean. Edith and Newton purchased the Ipswich place, ordered it taken apart and had it shipped in 688 packing cases to the wharf at Greenwich.

  Newton immediately found himself engrossed in the project, an impossible dream for an Anglophile and an antiquarian both. The idea fit with the couple’s mutual fantasies of the
glories of the past. A proper country home, as if tailor-made for a proper English couple. Not just like England, but actually from England. Built in the year 1597? That was a dozen years before Hudson sailed the Half Moon to Manhattan Island. Shakespeare was writing The Merchant of Venice. Elizabeth sat on the throne.

  “My house is the oldest in America,” Newton would assert proudly. It was perfect, too perfect, too much. But there were times, as Mark Twain said about whiskey, when too much was just about right. The indigenous cottage, Newton wrote the editor of the Architectural Record, represented “a fine object lesson in good construction,” and was “charmingly naïve in its directness and easy simplicity.”

  Draft horses hauled the 688 packing cases to the building site at the crest of their property’s principal hill, where the view spread out so fabulously down to the Sound. The best thing? The puzzle boxes came accompanied by all the king’s men to put the whole thing back together again. An English construction crew landed with the crates. Newton had emphasized to Messrs. Gill & Reigat, contractors of Oxford Street in London, that their services in rebuilding the house must include employing “the best skilled English labor in constructing, erecting and finishing the house,” which would be restored “as a gentleman’s house of this class would be in England” in terms of its “masonry, woodwork, plaster, etc.”

  The project would be costly, even for Edith and Newton, especially when the Panic of 1910 hit. An economic depression that followed the Sherman Antitrust Act, limiting monopolies and cartels, it affected mainly stock traders, but anyone with a hand in the market stood to take a loss. Newton complained of having to curtail his bond buying for the duration, and having to slow construction. The contract with Gill & Reigat, he wrote a Wall Street associate, would “more than use up my available income.” Still, he managed to pay the bills.

  Newton and Edith had already broken ground for a new country house before the serendipity of the Ipswich house cropped up, and Newton strove to blend his original design with the imported cottage.

  During the Ipswich cottage’s reconstruction, the workers found that some flooring and a few timbers were missing. Fate was with them, since just then the submerged wreck of an English ship, the Duke of Wellington, had been found off the New Jersey shore. Newton had it raised, and retrieved its proper English timbers for use in his new manse.

  Assembling all this, Newton “followed as closely as possible the spirit of the best English practices of the sixteenth century.” Right down to the horsehair in the mortar. Five colossal chimney stacks and a pennant-flying flagpole reinforced an impression among visitors that they had somehow wandered into a well-groomed corner of jolly old England. Newton and Edith created for themselves an outsize distraction: a house that could have materialized out of a historic view.

  The end result sprawled. It had something of the gargantuan flavor of Shadow Brook, although it fell a few dozen rooms short of Helen and Anson’s monstrosity. It echoed Brick House, too, just down the Connecticut coastline. On a clear day, Rose and Graham’s Caritas hove into view, a shimmering green lozenge off the shore to the northeast. Yes, the new country place nestled in the warm bosom of the Stokes family. But it was, truth be told, a trump card, higher in elevation, grander in conception and—it could not be repeated often enough—older in fact than any other home in the nation.

  Apart from the platoon of laborers, the Ipswich cottage came with a name, High-Low House, its provenance lost in the Suffolk mists. A central, octagonal great hall defined High-Low’s interior space, with a massive hearth square in the middle of it. Newton surrounded the original cottage with a design that featured not only the customary billiard room and library on the first floor, but also a “golf room.” Upstairs, seven bedrooms afforded plenty of space for guests as well as for the in-residence family of just three.

  Newton’s architectural sketches of High-Low House, faded now, show three stories of timbered stucco and stone, leaded windows, a walled formal garden. The structure manages to look both weathered and precisely maintained, a stage set fit for a wandering troupe of Shakespearean players. The sketches tell the story of a couple bent on re-creating the past but bringing to it a level of beauty that perhaps the messy former reality never had.

  The setting had to be complete, too. The landscape artist Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., the son of the Central Park designer, was both a friend and a professional colleague of Newton’s. Olmsted contributed a surrounding “plaisance” for the site, a secluded park with a pleached allee of small-leafed lindens. On occasion, at the urging of Newton and Edith, Olmsted spent the night at the Round Hill Road property, in order to walk the land and get the feel of the site. Newton and Edith installed a farmer and his wife in their former home, the original rustic farmhouse, and hired a full-time “intelligent working woodsman with knowledge and experience of practical forestry” to keep the roughly seventy-five acres of woodland surrounding the new house looking pruned and picture perfect.

  Inside, High-Low’s walls were hung with great art, including the Sargent portrait, which, Newton wrote the painter, “continues to be a great source of satisfaction to us both,” and which offered a splash of modernity amid the classic décor. For her part, Edith knew the painting reminded all who entered that, as the muse of artists and as an inspiration to those who viewed their work, she had once embodied youthful beauty.

  The couple had given their estate the name Khakum Wood, after a local spring. Edith created another kind of beauty there, in the form of a house and grounds that would inspire anyone who was exposed to them. Newton may have done the architectural renderings, but the place was hers, both fundamentally and literally, since she held the deed. Between the two of them, Edith was, as her husband put it, “the real farmer,” in charge of the whole Khakum Wood enterprise. She remained an exceptionally beautiful woman, and still acted as a muse and helpmate for her husband, but she would never again play an extensive public role as she had in years past.

  The couple’s lives diverged along traditional lines. While Newton was off saving a priceless bit of New Yorkiana from the dust heap of history, Edith concentrated on home and child. Her interests outside the house, such as the presidency of the Kindergarten Association, reflected her primary responsibility of raising Helen.

  Edith wanted her only child to have the best schooling possible, the formal education that Susanna had denied her. Every school-day morning when the family was in Manhattan, she packed Helen off to Miss Chapin’s, “Manhattan’s smartest school for girls” (as Time magazine had it), then on East 57th Street. There, Helen Stokes joined such trust-fund daughters as Abigail Rockefeller and Gladys Moore Vanderbilt (later Countess Széchenyi).

  Each day at Miss Chapin’s began with prayer, hymns and the choral recitation of a Bible verse by the whole school. In preparation for future handling of husbands, inheritances and servant-staffed households, Chapin girls were put through a rigorous regime that included, progressively enough, athletics and student government. Beginning from the year 2000 B.C., they marched down the centuries by memorizing some five dates each week.

  The nearness of Susanna, with her townhouse abutting Edith’s, proved both a blessing and a curse. Edith’s sister May lived the next townhouse over on 22nd Street with her husband, Henry Dwight Sedgwick, the urbane lawyer and writer. Older brother Bob now lived on the other side of her. May’s three-progeny household contrasted with the relative quiet of Edith’s, but together they made a close-knit family. The cousins spent precious childhood hours together at Khakum Wood, roistering about the place. Helen was best friends with Francis, May’s youngest son, and together they fought wars against the neighboring children and challenged each other to athletic feats. “It was an island for all of us,” Helen wrote later, “a serene, secure place.”

  Edith and Newton still attended the major balls and dances of Manhattan’s social season. With her penetrating blue eyes and shining, dark-hued hair, forever kept long but put up and fixed just so whenever sh
e went into society, Edith, as ever, put forth a dauntingly beautiful physical presence. “A woman of a certain age” is from Balzac (in The Message: “Young as we both were, we still admired ‘the women of a certain age,’ that is, women between thirty-five and forty”). The discreet phrase once suggested spinsterhood, but in the early years of the twentieth century, it applied to just such a woman as Edith, still magnetic though past child-bearing age.

  Edith’s days took on the systolic rhythm of the upper class, going back to Manhattan during the week, leaving for High-Low on the weekends. Edith and Newton were often apart. In summer, Edith and Helen would leave for Birch Island or Murray Bay weeks before Newton felt he could get away from his work. These months also had a rhythm of their own. Normally, the family would go north to the Adirondacks first, then move on to Canada later. Newton would grab a weekend or occasionally a week at a time.

  If High-Low was meant to divert Newton from his obsession with the Iconography, it did not work. Instead, it served as a refuge and an occupation for Edith as her husband sank deeper into the abyss of his project. In the private enclave of Khakum Wood, Newton would sometimes find diversions, such as employing his exotic Japanese jinrikisha to “pull my wife and little girl around on my place in the country.” But a truer image for Newton Stokes was that of a man dragging the archival weight of Old New York behind him.

  SLOWLY, THE ICONOGRAPHY changed from a solitary pursuit to a full-scale team effort. The boulder gained momentum as it rolled down the hill. Newton had already lined up Walter Gillis, of Gillis Press, to supervise the printing. Sidney L. Smith would engrave the interstitial artwork known as head and tail pieces, illustrations that introduced and followed chapters, captions and other pieces of prose. F. A. Ringler and Company handled the photogravure work, making the intaglio plates, considered at the time to be the finest way of reproducing artwork for use in books.