Chapter 1
1893-1903
One of her earliest memories was of ice-green water. She was hurrying toward the sea, then a sudden loop in the road revealed vast waves frothing lacily on the sand.
And another memory: She was gazing out the window, content to watch the fall of the rain, when without warning her heart beat “wild in my breast with pain.”
She was supposed to have been born in New York City, but instead she showed up prematurely at the seashore on August 22, 1893. That summer, as always, her family was living at West End, New Jersey. The Rothschilds had their routines. As soon as the children’s schools closed in June, they packed up household and servants and left the city. Henry Rothschild, who had his business to attend to, joined them on Sundays.
They prided themselves on renting a house at West End, which was next door to Long Branch, a seaside resort that had been the favorite spa of presidents from Grant to Arthur and that presumed to call itself “the Monte Carlo of America.” West End, slightly less exclusive, was favored by the Guggenheims and other immensely rich Jewish families. (“My God, no, dear! We’d never heard of those Rothschilds!” as Dorothy was later to say.) Nevertheless, these Rothschilds knew the fashionable places to summer, and they had enough money to be among the select.
They loved Cedar Avenue with its huge gingerbread houses, the swings and screened porches, everything that accompanied living at the shore in summer. They ate big meals for breakfast, and before it grew too hot, they waded into the surf, taking care to obey the swimming flags, red for gentlemen, white for ladies. The water was always icy. Later they slowly promenaded along Ocean Avenue carrying parasols, strolling past the big hotels that had recently begun to charge four dollars a day, American plan, gawking at the casinos where derbied dice rollers and roulette spinners displayed gardenias in their buttonholes. They would not have dreamed of entering; they were not those kind of people. In the evenings, bands played Sousa marches and favorites from H.M.S. Pinafore. At West End, everybody attended the concerts. Nearly every day there was sailing and lawn tennis, and shore suppers at the beach—the best roasted clams, corn fritters with hard sauce, huckleberry pie, and it all tasted wonderful. That year a financial panic was battering the economy. In New York, on the Lower East Side, where the Rothschild money originated, people lined up on the sidewalks for free bread and soup. At the shore, people talked about the flies, but otherwise they had few complaints about their lives.
On a weekend toward the end of August, a hard rain hit the shore. Water hurtled down in spears. The thunder blasted like fireworks. Trees were ripped up by the wind. By Monday morning, the storm had passed. Since the weather promised to be good, Henry Rothschild felt confident leaving his family to go back to town. Summertime was his busiest season.
Shortly thereafter, Eliza Rothschild went into labor. The evening after the baby came, the shore was pounded by a West Indian cyclone that knocked the chimney off their roof; the flagpole cracked and crashed, and the walls rocked on their foundation. At any moment it seemed like the house would collapse and crush them. After a terrible night, the children ventured forth to discover that not a bathhouse was left standing on the beach, and the old iron pier had been washed out to sea like a sand castle.
When Henry Rothschild returned to Cedar Avenue, he found a baby and a house that needed a new chimney.
Dorothy’s paternal grandparents came from Prussia, swept across the Atlantic in the wave of German-Jewish emigration after the abortive 1848 revolution. Samson and Mary Rothschild, a couple in their twenties, were concerned about the future and were afflicted, as were so many others, by New World fever. They heard about the marvels of America and began to dream radiant dreams. Being rural people, they decided to bypass New York and to seek a small town where an ambitious young man could establish himself, where people had money to spend on quality goods. Samson and Mary settled in Selma, Alabama, where their first child, Jacob Henry, Dorothy’s father, was born in 1851. A few Jews lived in the area but none in Selma, which was primarily populated with English stock. Samson sold fancy goods—embroideries, laces, all the trimmings that Southern women treasured so highly. He peddled his finery by wagon. They had two more sons, Simon and Samuel. The Rothschilds learned to speak English with a southern accent, imitated the courteous manners of their neighbors, and suffered the anti-Semitic remarks that unthinking customers made.
Samson worked tirelessly for ten years. He prospered to some extent, but he still felt restless, dissatisfied. He was nearly forty. A few southern Jewish merchants understood that war might be likely one day and formulated business strategies to their advantage. Whether Samson was equally farsighted or whether he simply became fed up with Selma is impossible to know. He packed up and moved his family to New York City in 1860.
There being little demand for embroideries during the Civil War, Samson switched to men’s wear. By 1865, he was listed in the city directory as the proprietor of a “gents furnishings” store at 294 Broadway. Elsewhere in the city lived German Jews like August Belmont, who had changed their names, become rich men, and lived in absurdly ornate palaces on Fifth Avenue. Those were not the addresses Samson dreamed about. He felt lucky to move his family, now expanded by the births of Hannah and Martin, from Avenue B to sensible and better houses in East Thirteenth Street and then to pastoral West Forty-second Street. Based on his personal experience and immigrant faith, Samson believed that you get what you want by hard work. Like his biblical namesake, he was a hardy specimen, a proud, vigorous, physically strong man who lived into his eighties; even then it was his mind that first failed him, not his body. Armed with self-confidence, he had just the qualities suitable for earning his bread by persuasion fused with the flamboyance required to make a sale. The founding father of these “folk of mud and flame,’ as Dorothy called them, was undisturbed about “fiddling” for his dinner, however crude he may have seemed to subsequent generations.
Samson’s eldest son had a personality similar to his own—hearty, aggressive, and industrious. Jacob Rothschild was smart and highly amibitious, but sometimes his ambitions tended to run along alarming lines. Jacob disliked his given name. During adolescence, he began calling himself Henry, his own middle name, which must have sounded more American to him. In the course of his life, his first name passed through several incarnations, but he never tampered with his surname. There may have been Rothschilds who were butchers, but others were lords and bankers. It was an aristocratic name. Everything else he inherited from Samson was open to the winds of revision.
In 1868, the family rented half of a modest, two-family dwelling at 124 West Twenty-seventh Street, not far from stylish Madison Square, where the best stores and restaurants were located. Some months after the Rothschilds moved to the new house, the neighboring flat was occupied by a machinist named Thomas Marston, his wife Caroline, and their three children Eliza Annie, Frank, and Susan. Henry (né Jacob) Rothschild is recorded in the census taker’s book as eighteen years old. Eliza Annie Marston is nineteen. Living in the same house, seeing each other every day, they fell in love.
Even to a romantic young woman, Henry’s religion must have presented an insurmountable obstacle. By the standards of both families, marriage was unthinkable. Eliza Marston had been born in 1851 into a family of highly skilled English gunsmiths. Although, in the twentieth century, certain Marstons decided that their forebears arrived on the Mayflower, the plain fact is that Eliza’s grandparents, Stanhope and Elizabeth Marston, came to New York in the late 1830s with three children and two of Stanhope’s younger brothers.
This was not a family that went its individual ways. The men worked together, sharing what amounted to an obsession with firearms, lived in neighboring streets, and named their children for each other. As early as 1853, when Eliza was two, Stanhope and his brother William already held a number of important patents and had systematically set about making themselves rivals of Colt and Deringer. The Marstons manufactured percussion pepperboxes, pistols, and revolvers at a two-floor plant on Jane Street, where they employed 140 workers. That same year their breech-loading and self-cleaning rifles, on display at the Crystal Palace Exhibition, were greatly admired by Horace Greeley, who later visited Jane Street and wrote a glowing description of the Marston arms.
If the Marston brothers had been no more than small-potatoes gunsmiths in England, they were destined to prosper in America. By the outbreak of the Civil War, they were making rifles and carbines for the government in an immense four-story factory on Second Avenue called the Phoenix Armory. To New Yorkers it was a familiar, visible landmark, too visible for the Marstons’ own good. In the summer of 1863, during the draft riots, a mob of some four thousand protesters aimed straight for the armory, shattered its windows with the biggest paving stones they could find, and finally forced the doors, despite the police squads assigned to its defense. When the armory went up in flames, most employees escaped through a rear entrance, but those cut off by the fire panicked and jumped to their deaths. The Marstons rebuilt the Phoenix Armory and continued to rake in wartime profits.
Eliza’s father did not distinguish himself in the family business, despite his being Stanhope’s eldest son, his only son after the deaths of the two younger boys. Tom Marston worked at Phoenix Armory as nothing more than a machinist, possibly because, unlike his father and uncle, he lacked a technical gift for inventions. As a skilled laborer he earned ample wages to exist comfortably and presumably had no higher aspirations. Tom and Caroline lived modestly, perhaps even frugally. Since rents were low and concessions of a month or two free rent common, nearly every spring they would pile their household goods on a cart and shuttle the family to a new flat, never far distant from the armory. Every morning Tom walked to his job, every evening he returned to Nineteenth Street or Thirty-second Street, or whatever street they happened to be living on that particular year. When his son Frank was nearly grown, he was duly apprenticed to a printer. Whatever the Marstons’ expectations for their daughters, they were not interested in a match with a German Jew. When the situation between Eliza and Henry Rothschild became too obvious to ignore, the Marstons took action to solve the problem. They moved.
Eliza Marston was a young woman of iron will and independent mind. To be a single woman sentenced to spending the rest of her life with her parents or as a spinster aunt was unimaginable. She wanted marriage, children, and a home of her own, but she decided to forgo these experiences if they were not to be shared with Henry. She found a job teaching in a public school, not a usual step in her day.
As the years passed, both Eliza’s brother and sister married and departed. She remained at home with her parents, outwaiting time and opposition. The summer of 1880, when she was nearly thirty, Eliza and Henry finally married.
When Dorothy was a child, at West End and other summer resorts, she would ask new playmates, “What street do you live on?”; never, “What town do you live in?” It did not occur to her until much later that people might live elsewhere than in New York. Her favorite image of the city was seeing it in the rain, smelling with sensual pleasure the odor of wet asphalt, picturing the empty streets “black and shining as ripe olives.” Other places she lived would give her a sense of serenity, but New York meant uncertainty. She never knew what was going to happen next.
No. 214 West Seventy-second Street was a four-story townhouse with striped awnings hooding the windows on the street and red roses in the backyard. A decade earlier the area had been open fields, but by 1894 it had been transformed into one of the city’s most exclusive residential districts. It was bisected by a broad, tree-lined parkway layed out in the style of a Parisian boulevard and accordingly named the Boulevard (until 1901 when the avenue was renamed Broadway). Prestigious Seventy-second Street was flanked by private residences, a few august apartment houses like the Dakota, and a collection of churches designed by eminent architects. The Rothschild house stood on the south side of Seventy-second, only a few doors from its intersection with the Boulevard, a corner dominated by the Hotel St. Andrew and an elite men’s club called the Colonial. Both of these immense buildings were as gaily swaddled with American flags as Fourth of July bandstands.
Dorothy was Eliza and Henry’s fourth and last child, their second daughter. Harold, Bertram, and Helen were twelve, nine, and six when she was born. She later attributed her sense of estrangement from them to the age difference. Their house was spacious, but there was little room to spare with four children, Eliza’s widowed father, and four or five Irish servants, the latter group apparently given to high-spirited insubordination and sudden departures. Her parents would, Dorothy said, “go down to Ellis Island and bring them, still bleeding, home to do the laundry. You know, that didn’t encourage them to behave well.”
If Henry had once been found undesirable as a son-in-law, he was now a prosperous gentleman, respectable and respected. Lean and strikingly good looking as a youth, he had since acquired a stomach but still cut a dashing figure with his handlebar mustache and a gold chain across his vest. He behaved like other well-to-do bourgeois. A coachman drove him to his office in the Lower Broadway business district. In the evenings he dressed for dinner and afterward might visit the Progress or Criterion clubs, where he would pass a dignified hour with brandy and cigars. He served on the board of trustees of Mount Sinai Hospital, one of his few remaining concessions to his Jewish roots. Now known as J. Henry Rothschild, he had reached a proud middle age in which the fruits of struggle and American capitalism had combined to give him his heart’s desire.
Ready-to-wear cloaks—styling, producing, and selling them—were the chief passion of Henry’s life. It was an extremely competitive field, more notable for bankruptcies and nervous collapses than for philosophic contemplation or the reading of great literature. Beginning as a stock clerk at a time when cloaks were still custom-tailored or imported, Henry had foreseen the possibilities of manufactured women’s apparel and had associated himself while still in his twenties with the former owner of a retail cloak shop, Meyer Jonasson. The pioneering Jonasson, also a German Jew, saw no reason why fine cloaks could not be mass produced. He had need of a bold young man with ideas and energy, and in no time at all Henry was established as a partner in the firm. By the time Dorothy was born, Meyer Jonasson & Company had been a household name, the General Motors of the cloak and suit industry, for nearly fifteen years. The garment industry called J. Henry Rothschild “the greatest salesman of them all,” a man whose name was synonymous with “personal magnetism, good fellowship, and loyalty to his friends.”
While Jonasson and other German Jews controlled the manufacture of cloaks, they relied for labor upon tens of thousands of Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1880s and 1890s and settled in a half square mile on the Lower East Side. The second-generation Germans welcomed these Russian and Polish co-religionists as they would have greeted a plague. The immigrants, they believed, gave all Jews a bad name: They were filthy and diseased, had no objections to crowding ten to a room in tenements that stank of onions and urine, and were grateful to work eighty-five hours a week doing piecework for pennies. At 358 Broadway, Henry Rothschild proudly conducted out-of-town buyers through the Jonasson factory, which appeared to be a model of sanitation and employee comfort. In fact, practically none of the work was performed on the premises. It was farmed out to small contractors who operated the sweatshops where Jonasson’s garments were made up by the newly arrived immigrants.
Jewish New York, by the 1890s, was a dual universe. One half was the uptown refuge of the Rothschilds, with its cheeky Irish maids and seaside houses, the other was Jewtown’s Essex and Hester streets with its old-world samovars and menorahs, its rag peddlers and Pig Market, its hives of cutters, pressers, basters, finishers, and embryonic anarchists. Henry Rothschild, family legend says, had a holiday ritual. Every Christmas Eve, it was his habit to ride through the streets of the Lower East Side in his coach. In his lap lay a stack of white envelopes, each containing a crisp new ten-dollar bill. These tips he distributed to the neighborhood police officers.
Conflicts and a sense of shame persisted throughout his youngest daughter’s life. Never once was she heard to refer to the invisible backdrop of her early life, the humid, steamy pressing rooms where the temperatures reached 120 degrees. It was not only her father and his Philistine friends she would disdain, it was also the whole disorderly Rothschild tribe. The aunts and uncles were dedicated wisecrackers who loved a boisterous time. At family gatherings, the table would be in an uproar—choleric Sam unable to enjoy his money; Simon, who never took a job or a woman seriously; practical Hannah, who always made sure that telegrams arrived on Dorothy’s birthday; dapper Martin, having wooed and won a Catholic heiress, trying to pass for one of those Rothschilds; Dorothy’s cousins Ethel, Harold, and Monroe. They ate and argued and laughed. They traded funny stories at the tops of their voices. Even their depressions could be apocalyptically clangorous. From another perspective, the Rothschild horseplay might be interpreted as healthy merriment. To Dorothy, her relatives were absurd, noisy figures, “silly stock” whom she shrank from acknowledging as part of her emotional geography. As an adult, she was careful to speak quietly and regally, possibly so that no one would ever mistake her for a Rothschild. She had, one of her friends remembered,
lovely speech, a little drawl that was very attractive, very upper-class. It was finishing-school talk, but not the Brearley accent, not the West Side private-school accent, it was her own. She talked like a woman who as a little girl had attended a very good singing school. That was what made her use of the words fuck and shit so amusing, because you simply did not expect it.
Eliza Rothschild was forty-two when Dorothy was born. Seven years earlier she had put infants and feedings behind her and must have taken care to avoid another pregnancy. Approaching menopause, unhappy about growing old, she quietly subtracted three years from her age.
In the innocent world that Dorothy was born into, Grover Cleveland was president, little girls wore middies and brown stockings, little boys sailor suits. Although manners were expected of both sexes, mealtimes at the Rothschild table were often rowdy because it was a lively, affectionate family much given to laughter and activity. Dorothy, at an early age, mastered the art of spitting through her teeth, and Bert and Harry liked to dare their sisters to hold ice cream under their tongues, contests that invariably ended with the girls shrieking.
Their lives had slow, familiar rhythms. In winter they rode sleighs and drank hot chocolate. July and August were spent at the shore. None of their residences had either electricity or telephone. All housework was performed by servants, and the Rothschild girls were brought up in the expectation that people would serve them.
In 1897, their summer at West End was cut short by Thomas Marston’s death. Back in the city, Eliza conferred with her lawyer and composed a will that divided her estate of fifty-two thousand dollars into four equal trust funds for the education of her children.
The following summer, when Dorothy was five, the Rothschilds looked forward to unbroken months by the sea. All day long, week after yellow week, the sun throbbed against the dunes, their world all striped into bands of pale-blue sky, crystal water, and the sand the color of straw. The band played medleys of Strauss waltzes. In mid-July Eliza fell sick with persistent diarrhea that grew worse. She also had coughing fits that left her so weak she could barely speak afterward. A Dr. Simmons was summoned to Cedar Avenue. For several days Eliza kept to her bed. A curious silence permeated the house. Even the children played quietly. On July 20, a thunderstorm clattered at the windowpanes. The children remained inside all day, restless in the silent house. Later that evening, or perhaps the next morning, Dorothy learned that Eliza had gone off to a place called “the Other Side”—terrible words to her. She was told that Eliza would not come back, but surely they would meet again, because Eliza was waiting there for Dorothy.
Dorothy screamed her head off, but Eliza did not reappear. Afterward, it occurred to her that the last sound her mother must have heard was the friendly hissing of the rain falling from the sky. That was a comfort to her because the rain always had seemed magical to Dorothy.
It rained every day the rest of that week. The family accompanied the coffin from the funeral parlor in Long Branch, across the gray water on the ferry, then uptown to the Bloomingdale Reformed Church near their house. It was still pouring on Saturday when they gathered on a muddy knoll at Woodlawn Cemetery and watched the coffin sink into the soggy ground. Due to the swiftness of Eliza’s demise, an autopsy had been performed. Her death certificate gave the cause of death as “diarrhea with colic followed by weakness of the heart. Postmortem showed artery disease.” As some of Dorothy’s adult behavior suggests, she could never rid herself of the guilty suspicion that she somehow had caused Eliza’s death.
Her mother, Dorothy said, “promptly went and died on me.” Her short stories were understandably devoid of loving mothers—indeed, there is not a one in the whole lot. Hazel Morse’s mother in “Big Blonde,” a “hazy” woman who had died, most closely resembles her own situation with Eliza. Many of her mothers are either indifferent or actively abusive to their children. Camilla, in “Horsie,” dismisses her newborn daughter with the chilling words, “Good night, useless.” Fan Durant, a woman intimidated by her husband, can’t prevent his disposing of the children’s pet while they sleep.
Most autobiographical in Dorothy’s gallery of mothers is Mrs. Matson, in “Little Curtis,” who adopts a four-year-old boy for questionable motives, then treats him so sadistically that one could almost applaud matricide. In the story of young Curtis, first called “Lucky Little Curtis,” Dorothy drew on her experience with the second Mrs. Rothschild.
Eleanor Frances Lewis, a retired teacher, was forty-eight, the same age as Henry Rothschild. Never married, she lived with a younger brother a dozen blocks from the Rothschilds. Coming from working-class people—her father had been an upholsterer—she had managed by thrift, hard work, and living as a maiden aunt in the homes of her brothers to accumulate a nest egg of nearly five thousand dollars, plus her investment of five shares in a teachers’ building and loan association.
For Henry, Eliza’s death had been a catastrophe. He alternately struggled to remember and to forget her. Finding unbearable the memories associated with the house on Seventy-second Street, he quickly sold it and moved to a rented house a half-block away, then six months later gave that up and purchased an exquisite limestone row house on West Sixty-eighth Street near Central Park. By this time, Henry had met and decided to marry Eleanor Lewis, the second Christian schoolteacher he liberated from spinsterhood. The new house symbolized his determination to build a new life for himself and to have someone care for his children. On the first business day after the start of the new century, January 3, 1900, Henry and Eleanor were married at City Hall. The bride stated that it was her first marriage. So did the groom, an unconscious mistake on Henry’s part or else the clerk’s pen slipped.
None of the Rothschild children liked Eleanor, and Dorothy hated her. Never would she be able to understand or forgive her father for what appeared to be his unaccountably hasty betrayal of Eliza. Harry, Bert, and Helen, now eighteen, sixteen, and thirteen, expressed their coldness by addressing their stepmother as “Mrs. Rothschild.” Although she urged them to call her mother, explaining that “Mrs.” hurt her feelings, they had no interest in soothing her feelings. Dorothy refused to address her at all. “I didn’t call her anything. ‘Hey, you,’ was about the best I could do.” It is not difficult to imagine the size of the problem facing the new Mrs. Rothschild. Henry, sensing his wife’s frustration, bought her jewelry and groped for special ways to please her.
Henry had remarried to make a bad situation better; he had only succeeded in making matters worse, and now it seemed he could do nothing right. On Sundays, he took Eleanor and the children on excursions to the Bronx, where they visited Eliza’s grave at Woodlawn. “That was his idea of a treat,” said Dorothy. It was a five-minute walk from the cemetery entrance to Myrtle Plot. The moment he caught sight of the marker wreathed with its stone flowers, emotions overrode dignity, the grief came rushing back, and he would start crying. “Whenever he’d hear a crunch of gravel that meant an audience approaching, out would come the biggest handkerchief you ever saw, and in a lachrymose voice that had remarkable carrying power, he’d start wailing, ‘We’re all here, Eliza! I’m here. Dottie’s here. Mrs. Rothschild is here—’ ” At these moments Dorothy hated him.
Judging by her numerous poetical references to graves, coffins, and the Dead—a term that essentially meant Eliza—the Woodlawn outings had consequences that would have astounded Henry, for they provided food for his daughter’s ripening fantasies. While he blubbered and waved his hankie, she observed him and inwardly smiled to think how her mother “would laugh, could you have heard the things they said.” Unlike her husband, Eliza would not permit herself, living or dead, to make a fool of herself. Dorothy imagined her with hands crossed, lying quietly underfoot in shiny wood and eavesdropping on the dramas taking place above.
When Dorothy was six, she idealized her mother. Twenty-five years later, carrying the same pictures in her head but no longer able to disguise her angry feelings, she decided the dead “do not welcome me” and furiously denounced them as “pompous.”
Dorothy and her sister attended Blessed Sacrament Academy, a private parochial school run by the Sisters of Charity. Academically, it was one of the city’s finest schools and had the added advantage of being located close by in a double brownstone on West Seventy-ninth Street. She walked there with one of the housemaids. She never forgot the laundry smell of the nuns’ robes, the desks covered with oilcloth, Sister Dionysius’s cold-eyed glances, the haughtiness of her classmates.
Helen had no trouble fitting in, but she was that sort of person. Dorothy had no intention of belonging. She referred to the Immaculate Conception, which struck her as sounding a little fishy, as “spontaneous combustion” and felt enormously pleased at having thought up the joke. She made a special effort to criticize everyone and sought reasons to find them ridiculous. “They weren’t exactly your starched crinoline set, you know. Dowdyest little bunch you ever saw.”
There was another girl who hated Blessed Sacrament. Mercedes de Acosta, the daughter of a wealthy Spanish-Cuban family, had a married sister who was suing her husband for divorce. The newspapers were full of sensational stories about the suit, which prompted the children at school to gossip maliciously that Rita was trying to sell her son to her husband for a million dollars. Mercedes, squaring off against her persecutors, traded taunt for taunt, in which endeavor Dorothy was only too eager to aid and abet. Before long, the nuns had cast them as the school troublemakers, parts the two scrappy little girls played with relish. Eighty years later, a student who had been three grades ahead of them at Blessed Sacrament could still remember the pair behaving so badly that their teacher suffered “a breakdown.” Dorothy was reputed to be just as devilish out of school. She even invented a secret language that drove her parents very nearly out of their minds.
All day long the nuns talked about Jesus. When she arrived home from school Dorothy found Eleanor bustling right out to interrogate her.
“Did you love Jesus today?” she asked Dorothy.
Despite her piety, there must have been times when Eleanor felt like strangling the miserable brat. Instead, she admonished lucky little Dorothy to count her blessings: Didn’t she have everything a child might want? Eleanor naturally was talking about herself, the lonely woman reincarnated into a prosperous man’s wife and the mistress of a dream house. Even though marriage had brought unexpected miseries, precisely because it had brought them, she had to work hard to deny them and prescribed gratitude as a worthy attitude. Dorothy laughed when Eleanor turned her back, and sometimes before she had.
Dorothy did not feel lucky. Eleanor made her say prayers and lectured her about regular bowel movements. The nuns were mean, her friends few, her brothers too grown up to play with her. One day she glimpsed Harry, or else it was Bert, swaggering down the street with a friend, who pointed at her and asked, “That your sister?”
“No,” her brother said.
She remembered this snub with great bitterness for the rest of her life.
After her birthday in August, there was Christmas to look forward to: working herself into a frenzy of anticipation, crossing out the days on her calendar, then finally Christmas dawn and crawling downstairs groggy with sleeplessness. But to find what? That Santa Claus and Jesus and Eleanor had remembered her with a pair of galoshes she needed anyway, a board game called Dissected Wildflowers, a copy of Sylvia’s Summer in the Holy Land, and “a fountain pen that ceased to function after the third using.”
The struggle with Eleanor had evolved into trench warfare. Dorothy found further reasons to resent her and to wish the woman dead. Her weapons were the time-honored methods of sulfurous stares, extended silences, and responses that were at best grudging. These tactics drove Eleanor into a tizzy, but they provided a kind of stability to Dorothy’s life. After three years of hostilities, there came an unexpected cease-fire. She was trying to dream up more imaginative tortures when one morning in April 1903, she woke to learn that Eleanor had just fallen dead of an acute cerebral hemorrhage.
Now Dorothy had two murders on her conscience. The sudden deaths of Eliza and Eleanor became the twin traumas of her early life, her ticket to self-pity, a passe-partout to self-hatred and an unalterable conviction that she deserved punishment—the source of the negativity with which she grappled so unhappily—and so happily—thereafter. Reaffirmed was her perception of the world as a horrible place where people keeled over and died without warning. Nature had no right to be so mean. Therefore, she decided,
There’s little in taking or giving,
There’s little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine.
Eleanor willed various amounts to her own family and gave fifty dollars apiece to Harry. Bert, and Helen. As a final gesture to lucky little Dorothy, she left “such articles of jewelry as have been given me by my husband since my marriage to my step-daughter Dorothy Rothschild,” in the value of three hundred dollars.
After Eleanor’s untimely death, the house was empty of mothers. Next came the dogs.