An American Princess Read online

  Text copyright © 2015 by Annejet van der Zijl

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Michele Hutchison

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as De Amerikaanse prinses by Querido in the Netherlands in 2015. Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2018.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503951839 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503951839 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542049740 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542049741 (paperback)

  Cover design by PEPE nymi

  First edition

  The Marriages of Allene Tew

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE The Blue Room I

  1 Uncle George’s Cabin

  2 The Glittering Paradise

  3 The Lucky Plunger

  4 New York, New York

  5 The Happy Island

  6 Dogfight

  7 The Crippled Heart

  8 The American Princess

  9 The Fifth Man

  10 The Godmother

  11 Oceans of Love

  12 How not to Die

  EPILOGUE The Blue Room II

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  SOURCES

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  PROLOGUE

  The Blue Room I

  Winter 1954–1955

  Picture this: an old woman and the sea.

  The woman was old and not even a shadow of the beauty she had once been. The sea was cold and wild and looked nothing like the blue idyll of the summer. And the house she was staying in had been built as a holiday home; it was an entirely unsuitable place to spend the winter, let alone to convalesce—or to die.

  Old age and illness are destroyers of individuality. Just as babies look alike, so do people at the end of their lives. Those who stay in their birthplace may escape this fate somewhat if they still have people around them who know what they used to look like when they were in their prime. But this woman hadn’t stayed where she was born. On the contrary, she had allowed herself to be chased away, across the world—by fate, by her restlessness, or by a combination of the two. And now she had washed up in a ramshackle, drafty sea palace on the other side of the world, and there was nobody left who could pay testament to her youth or her beauty, her previous lives and loves, her lost ones, or the dramatic Technicolor movie of her life.

  Day and night the waves crashed onto the rocks beneath the house. And up there in the Blue Room, illness raged, as impetuous and stubborn as the waves. Her life slowly shrank until it was only a matter of months, weeks, days; the next minute, the next breath. As long as she kept breathing, she was still alive. As long as she lay awake at night and heard the sea, she was still there.

  In fact, her true self existed only in the pile of yellowing photographs next to her bed, and in memories that danced among the rushing and ebbing waves of sea and pain and flared in the flames of the log fire that had been kept burning day and night these past months. For if you no longer have a future, what else is there left but dreams of the past?

  1

  Uncle George’s Cabin

  Green—that was the color of the landscape of Allene’s youth. From the delicate green in the springtime, when young leaves spread themselves across the trees like net curtains, to the dark, heavy green of late summer foliage. From the bright green of the beeches to the grayish blue green of the firs and, in between, the very different shades of chestnuts, maples, birches, and cherry and walnut trees—the totality like a natural arboretum draped across the hills around Lake Chautauqua. Until the fall, when those trees burst into a fiesta of reds, oranges, and yellows before shriveling up in the freezing temperatures that blew down from Canada and the dark winter storms that blasted across the large watery expanses of Lake Erie.

  Then only the tops of the trees stuck out above a thick, thick layer of snow. The lake ossified into a silent black mirror, and the hills receded into a black-and-white landscape, with just the fierce red of a streaking fox to remind people that color still existed. They kept the fires burning day and night in the houses, which were themselves huddled under thick blankets of snow, enabling the inhabitants to survive the harsh winters of North America.

  With those fires begins the story of Allene Tew and her family in Jamestown, New York. And, almost at the same time, the story of the place itself begins, for the Tews were among the first young adventurers who dared build their futures on the then still-impenetrable and dangerous wilderness around the lake.

  Even before the Tews, though, the origins of Jamestown could be found in four covered wagons and one family. In 1806, the Prendergasts set off from Rensselaer County, in New York State’s Hudson Valley. The travelers—twenty-nine men, women, and children—headed from this region just east of New York City in search of new opportunities and, most important, fertile and still-unclaimed land. In fact, the Prendergasts were planning to travel to the large expanses of Tennessee, where land was being granted to anyone dogged enough to survive there.

  While still in New York, the travelers stopped beside a beautifully situated elongated lake in Chautauqua County. There they were approached by an agent from Holland Land Company, a Dutch banking conglomerate that had acquired more than three million acres a few years previously and was now trying to palm chunks of it off onto pioneers.

  The agent told them to look around: “This is the paradise of the New World.”

  And indeed, the Creator had done his very best in this part of the world. The hills around the lake were green and fertile, without the marshes or bald mountain massifs that often formed impediments in other regions. The summers were warm and wet, perfect for agriculture. Eighteen-mile-long Lake Chautauqua was brimming with fish, mainly pike and perch. And the uncultivated wilderness around it was swarming with animals that were used for fur and food: beavers, bears, otters, foxes, wolves, and deer, even panthers and other wild cats. The area was also rich in birdlife, particularly in the fall, when the view of the lake was almost blotted out by the numerous flapping flocks of ducks, cranes, herons, and swans.

  And so the family from Rensselaer County changed their plans. Wagons were anchored, paperwork signed. In total, the Prendergasts bought 3,337 acres on the north side of Lake Chautauqua, upon which they would build their new life.

  It was their youngest son, James Prendergast, who, a few years later, when looking for a group of runaway horses, discovered a flat piece of land near the rapids of the Chadakoin River, approximately three miles south of the lake. At eighteen he hadn’t yet come of age, but he had the entrepreneurial spirit of the rest of his family, and he asked his older brother to buy a thousand acres for him at two dollars each. In the summer of 1811, James, with the help of a servant, built a water-powered sawmill with an accompanying cabin, which he moved into with his young wife, Nancy. The loggers working for them built their own even more primitive cabins nearby.

  And so—it was that simple in the America of those years—Jamestown was born.

  It wasn’t easy at the start. Life in the wilderness was hard and dangerous, not only because of the bears and other wild animals but also because of the descendants of the Iroquois and Seneca tribes. The area had been their home until French colonists drove them off in the e
ighteenth century, but the hostility between the settlers and the area’s Indian tribes continued.

  The winters were long and lonely and brought with them new dangers—twice, the entire encampment, including the mill, burned to the ground. But the pioneers were young and determined, and they rebuilt their tiny village on the Chadakoin River from scratch each time. Two of James’s brothers organized a makeshift and irregularly stocked grocer’s shop; a veteran of the War of Independence built a pottery-cum-tavern; a carpenter from Vermont improvised a carpentry workshop; and shortly after that, the Tew brothers arrived. They cleared a plot of land and built a blacksmith’s forge on it.

  George and William Tew were also from Rensselaer County. They’d heard news of the promising little settlement deep in the woods through letters the Prendergasts had sent back to their hometown. George was twenty-one and a blacksmith’s apprentice by profession. His brother William, who was four years younger, had been trained as a cobbler but had also learned useful skills like spinning, sewing, and furniture making.

  While the Tew brothers built cabins, loggers tamed the forest, yard by yard, tree by tree. Every day, the sounds of chopping and sawing rang out, occasionally interrupted by shouting, creaking, or the last sigh of yet another forest giant being brought down. After the trees had been stripped of their branches and bark, they were floated down the river to the mill and sawed into beams and planks. Next the wood was transported by canoes or keelboats to the big cities by the river to the south, along with other merchandise including furs, salted fish, and maple syrup.

  For the return journey, the boats were laden with everything the forest dwellers needed and couldn’t produce themselves, such as nails, tools, ham, sugar, salt, and dried fruit. Tobacco and plenty of bottles of Monongahela rye, the famous strong whiskey made in Pittsburgh, were also aboard. As were potential new inhabitants, spurred on by the stories of the Jamestowners.

  By now, James Prendergast had divided his land into plots of 50 by 120 feet, which he sold to newcomers for fifty dollars apiece. A primitive bridge was built across the Chadakoin River, and the dirt road at a right angle to the river was given the obvious name of Main Street. Equally prosaically, the wagon tracks to the left and right of Main Street were called First Street, Second Street, and so on.

  In the early days, James was judge, postmaster, and unofficial mayor, but when the population of his cabin village surpassed four hundred in 1827, the inhabitants organized the first elections for a village council. Blacksmith George Tew, one of the few residents who had mastered the art of reading and writing, was elected village clerk. His first job was to set down on paper the rights and duties of his fellow villagers. Brother William was appointed second man in the fire brigade, the first collective activity the brand-new council took upon itself.

  In the years that followed, the settlement grew like wildfire. The Industrial Revolution spread to the new continent and had a positive effect on regions like this, where trees ensured unlimited supplies of fuel and the many rivers and streams formed a natural transport network. The arrival of the steamboat made canoes and keelboats superfluous and ensured regular connections with the outside world, something that increased the appeal of this forest village to those in search of new opportunities.

  In the cleared areas against the hillsides, farmers now settled—primarily Scandinavians, predisposed to handling the isolation, the primitive living conditions, and the long winters in this still-desolate land. They introduced stock breeding, orchards, beehives, tobacco plants, and the art of woodworking. After a while, real furniture factories rose up on the flat ground down by the river, which for some reason became known as Brooklyn Square and developed into Jamestown’s commercial heart.

  In the meantime, George Tew enjoyed his position as village clerk so much that he gave up his labors in the hot, sooty blacksmith’s shop and became an apprentice to the only lawyer for miles around. After a few years as the lawyer’s partner, he was elected county clerk, one of the most important administrative roles in the region, in 1834. This meant that he and his wife and children could move to the town of Mayville, at the northern tip of Lake Chautauqua, where government officials lived.

  The blacksmith’s shop on the corner of Main and Third Streets was left in the calloused hands of his brother William, who’d also started a family by this time. He was hardly lonely, however, as he had his wife and children, and his father and five sisters had all moved from Rensselaer County to Jamestown. Business was booming—so much that William could move to a brick house that also served as a store and workshop on the corner of Main and Second Streets, close to Brooklyn Square. He took on one of his brothers-in-law as a partner, hired a servant for the heavy work, and renamed the blacksmith’s shop the upscale-sounding W. H. Tew’s Copper, Tin and Sheet Iron Factory and Stove Store. A German maid was hired to help his wife with the family’s six children.

  Later, the man who would become Allene’s grandfather would be praised in an almanac as being of “high character.” According to his biographer, William Tew was a loyal family man, an ardent Republican, and a dedicated member of the Presbyterian Church. Aside from this, he was also the founder of Jamestown’s first temperance society. A less well-known role of William’s was the one he played in the Underground Railroad, a civilian network that smuggled slaves who had escaped from plantations in the South up to Canada.

  One of the few members of the middle class to do so, William advertised openly in the Liberty Press, the antislavery movement’s newspaper, which, since the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, had garnered a lot of support among the North American bourgeoisie. This type of activity was not completely free of danger: there were fines of $1,000 and prison sentences for anyone who helped the escapees, and slave owners would come to Jamestown to locate and demand return of their runaway slaves, if necessary. But the former cobbler’s apprentice was by now an established, widely esteemed citizen, which meant he could allow himself the luxury of having principles.

  William’s brother George’s star was rising to even greater heights. He had quickly moved beyond provincial government and, as director of the Bank of Silver Creek, was now one of the most influential movers and shakers of Chautauqua County. Members of the business community were lobbying hard to have their region included in the new railway network, which in those years was spreading across the map of North America like the web of a drunken spider.

  They succeeded. On August 25, 1860, the people of Jamestown witnessed a spectacle they’d remember for the rest of their lives. In the words of a wildly enthusiastic reporter for the Jamestown Journal: “The first iron horse that ever deigned to call in on our town drove majestically across the bridge on Main Street.”

  In fact, only a small train crawled into the still-very-provisional station in Jamestown, but it was still a great wonder. There was now a direct connection to cities like New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh via the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad. Within a single lifetime, a primitive collection of cabins that was once only reachable by horse or canoe had grown into a city of the world.

  The railway line gave wings to the woodworking industry, and Jamestown furniture soon became a household name across the entire United States. The textile industry flourished, too. As if the gods hadn’t looked down kindly enough upon the inhabitants, they provided another lucrative and entirely free export product in the form of large ice blocks, which could be hacked out of the frozen lake in the winter and transported by train to gigantic ice houses in the big cities. In this way, the lake played an indirect role in the revolution the introduction of cooled produce created in kitchens, as well as the great success America had on the global food market.

  The Civil War broke out in April 1861, and it seemed that this development might hamper Jamestown’s success. Four years later, on April 9, 1865, the North was victorious. Slavery was abolished, and the Southern states lost a great deal of their economic and political clout. The ink on the capitulation agreement
was barely dry before the economy in the North was booming as never before. The banking sector that had financed military efforts had done excellent business during the war, and the ever-entrepreneurial George Tew, together with his five adult sons, had set up his own bank. The Second National Bank of Jamestown made the onetime blacksmith’s helper one of Jamestown’s richest men in his old age. He became even more influential when all of his sons managed to marry girls from the region’s most prominent families, like the Prendergasts.

  Just as successful in work and marriage was Harvey, William Tew’s oldest son. After working for his father in the family business for seventeen years, in 1870 Harvey established a rubber factory with his brother-in-law Benjamin F. Goodrich. The story goes that the pair came up with the idea after large fires swept through Jamestown, which still consisted mainly of wooden buildings, sometimes wiping out entire neighborhoods. In winter, the fire brigade was repeatedly rendered powerless when the water froze in its leather hoses. The discovery that water stayed liquid in rubber hoses made the fortunes of Harvey and his brother-in-law and formed the basis of a company that would grow into one of the world’s largest tire producers.

  But there was one Tew who hadn’t effortlessly followed in the first generation’s successful footsteps, and that was the man who would become Allene’s father: Charles, William’s youngest son. He was born in 1849, the last male descendant in the second generation, and it was as though the available supply of energy and ambition had simply run out. While his brother and cousins had long been working in their fathers’ businesses by the time they reached the age of fifteen, Charles was still at school. And while every one of his cousins made socially beneficial matches, in 1871 Charles married Jennette Smith, the nine-years-older daughter of a local liveryman who also worked as a coachman and postman. Not only was Charles’s father-in-law from a significantly lower class than the Tew family, he was also a Southerner, from Tennessee.