An American Princess Read online

  Since then, the illness had spread across almost the entire continent at an alarming rate. While over a four-year period more than sixteen million people died in the First World War, Spanish flu managed to claim fifty million victims worldwide in just half a year. It was as though nature wanted to mimic the mass murder that humans had perpetrated upon themselves. A quarter of the American population fell sick. In hastily erected encampments on the edges of cities, doctors could do no more than just watch their patients die, often without even having the time to take their temperature. Surprisingly enough, those who were the most vulnerable during regular flu epidemics, such as children and old people, had the best chance of survival. The illness hit hardest young, healthy adults with strong immune systems, such as Teddy’s sister, Greta.

  Until this, Greta had experienced a safe war, first in Cuba and then in Guatemala and Vienna, where her husband was stationed at embassies. After America declared war, the couple returned home and Glenn was given an insignificant post in Washington. Greta had become pregnant in 1917 but had miscarried. She’d buried her stillborn child a stone’s throw from her family home in Locust Valley, in the pretty cemetery at the end of Feeks Lane that the area’s rich inhabitants had had designed a few years earlier by a son of Central Park architect Frederick Law Olmsted. Now she was pregnant again and, to her great joy, with twins.

  But sometime in the early weeks of October, as the entire Burchard family was on tenterhooks awaiting news about Teddy, a gray shadow also slipped into Greta’s house in Washington and laid a chilly hand on her shoulder. Shortly afterward, she began to cough. She died on Wednesday, October 16. The twin brothers who would have been Allene and Anson’s first grandchildren didn’t survive.

  On Friday, October 18, Allene bade farewell to her daughter. The funeral took place in the same chapel in Lattingtown where Greta, in her American bridal gown, had married Glenn almost four years previously to the day. Later that afternoon she was buried next to the place she’d earlier chosen for her stillborn baby.

  That same evening, the wheels of an army jeep crunched over the gravel drive of a Birchwood already immersed in grief. There was news about Teddy. Inhabitants of Masnières had reported seeing an airplane crash on the evening of September 27 on the Chemin des Rues des Vignes, outside the village. The Germans had removed the airplane, but the pilot had been buried in a shallow grave at the site, still wearing his lieutenant’s uniform. Now his identity had been determined with certainty.

  Later one of Teddy’s fellow pilots would write a melancholy poem about their war experiences, despairing that it had all been for nothing:

  We flew together, in the tall blue sky

  We fought together, with bombs and guns

  We ate together, in the squadron mess

  We danced together, to the old gramophone

  We walked together, in the fields of France

  We talked together, of home and tomorrow

  We flew together in the tall blue sky

  Many were killed. The world is no better.

  Teddy, too, had flown in the tall blue sky and fought with guns and bombs. He, too, had eaten in the squadron mess and danced with his comrades to the sounds of an old gramophone; he had walked through French fields, talking about the future. But for him it was now certain that no “home and tomorrow” would come.

  7

  The Crippled Heart

  In her later lives, after she’d changed her name, continent, hair color, and even her year of birth, Allene would almost never speak of her children, and not even of Anson. Only in passing: “Yesterday we were at Teddy’s grave. There were flowers there and so peaceful.” Or, “Anson always used to say if one was busy they did not seem to mind the heat too much.” But holding forth on sorrow or grief, on the dreams she’d had for Greta and Teddy, was not something Allene did. Indeed, most of the people she socialized with in her later years didn’t even know she’d once had children.

  Clearly a child of the nineteenth century, Allene hadn’t yet been infected with the modern idea that grief was a thing that needed to be processed or could even be healed, preferably by talking a lot. For the Victorians, fate was simply something to be borne, and that is what she did, without complaining. Her situation was like that of many others who were left behind like street litter after the world war. Just as they had to find a way to get through life with their missing limbs, blasted-away faces, and fractured nerves, so did she with her crippled heart.

  On November 11, 1918, the warring parties signed an armistice in the French Compiègne, and the war was finally over. Teddy Hostetter’s death was old news by then. Harvard’s secretarial office collected in a slender file the few newspaper clippings and bits and pieces—“Harvard graduate fails to return from air raid” and “sad but proud duty”—with which the Pomfret School had marked the death of its former pupil. Afterward the file labeled “T. R. Hostetter” disappeared into their archives with the accompanying note: “Death card made.”

  At the end of November, when the Spanish flu had burned itself out just as unexpectedly as it had flared up and people cautiously dared to socialize again, a memorial service for Lieutenant Hostetter was held in Saint Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue. There was no coffin. Immediately after they were recovered, Teddy’s remains had been reburied at one of the improvised burial grounds established in France in those days. But Allene kept the four flags used during the service—the Stars and Stripes, the Royal Air Force’s banner, and those of the 54 and 3 Squadrons—flying for weeks afterward at the Hospitality House for Junior Officers she had helped set up on Lexington Avenue, where young officers who had returned from France cheerfully went about their business.

  In Lattingtown, a memorial plaque was placed on the town library with the names of the 132 young men from the community who had fought in Europe. There was a gold star after three of those names, Teddy’s included, to indicate that they had paid with their lives. Greta and her children were memorialized, too. Just as Allene had ornamented the glory days of her daughter’s youth with flowers—wild roses for her graduation ceremony, spring flowers for her coming-out, and golden chrysanthemums for her wedding—she did the same for Greta’s death. A simple stone cross the height of a man, bearing Greta’s name surrounded by numerous decorative entwined lilies carved out of the hard stone, was placed on her grave.

  Then it was Christmas in an empty, quiet Birchwood, where memories of the past, when they were all together, were almost palpable in the rooms. And a new year dawned with nothing positive to offer. No joyous births, no wedding of Teddy and Kitty. No plans, no hope. No becoming a grandmother, no longer being a mother.

  Of course, other families in the United States were painfully confronted with empty places at the dinner table during the holidays—in total more than eighteen thousand young Americans had died. But it seemed that nowhere had fate so cruelly and definitively lashed out as on Allene’s happy island, which shortly before had appeared so safe.

  On February 17, 1919, the biggest and most triumphant victory parade that New York had ever seen moved along Fifth Avenue. Among more than a million spectators cheering on the returning soldiers was a young F. Scott Fitzgerald, who would later describe the memorable day in an essay in My Lost City:

  New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn east and north towards them—this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air [. . .] We felt like small children in a great bright unexplored barn.

  While New York was ringing in the world’s new start by drinking, dancing, and making love, about fifty miles away Allene was mourning the end of her world in the wintery silence of Locust Valley. A few days after the parade, Anson could take it no more and applied for new passports for the both of them; their previous ones had been taken away in connection with travel restrictions imposed during the submarine hostilities.

  Since international travel was sti
ll limited, Anson had to prove that the journey he wanted to make was of crucial importance. His boss, the CEO of General Electric, argued in a letter that after four and a half years of war, it was essential that one of his staff go and assess the status of the company’s European interests in person and that they’d invited Mr. Burchard to do this. A comparable document was prepared for Allene, with a personal note from Anson’s boss:

  It affords me pleasure to testify to the high character, loyalty and patriotism of Mrs. Burchard. She has been active in the connections with important relief work during the war period, and is in all respects qualified for the issuance of a passport.

  On the photograph attached to the passport application, Allene is looking straight into the camera—still a handsome woman at forty-six years old. But there is something in her gaze that makes the spectator almost uncomfortable. Anson, in his passport photo, mainly looks concerned and very, very serious.

  The application was granted, and on April 12, 1919, the Burchards boarded the RMS Aquitania for Liverpool. From there they traveled to Paris, where at least they were able to take Teddy’s fiancée in their arms again. The daughter of a famous New York book publisher, Kitty Kimball had spent most of her childhood in the French capital and had decided earlier that winter to travel to the continent that had robbed her of her future husband. She now worked as a correspondent for the American glossy magazine Victory, in which she had a column titled “Notes of an American in France.”

  By then, Kitty had been able to gather more information about Teddy’s last flight. He had been shot down by Robert Greim, a colleague of the famous Red Baron. This experienced fighter pilot had gone hunting for his twenty-fifth airborne victory that fateful day in September; his exploits would earn him a military medal and a knighthood. The young New Yorker hadn’t stood the slightest chance against him. At the end of the air battle, Greim had landed to take pictures of his crashed opponent. He’d added the photographs to his logbook as proof.

  Masnières, the village above which Teddy had fought his last dogfight, turned out to be an unremarkable farming hamlet on the Canal de l’Escaut of which only a collection of ruins was left after four years in the heat of battle. Allene and Anson decided on the spot to donate 100,000 francs to the community for the construction of a boys’ school that would carry the name of their late son. Not that their son had been such an enthusiastic school attendee, but his parents were still Victorian enough to be convinced of the value of good schooling for all.

  The Burchards traveled across the afflicted continent for six months. They visited Allene’s parents, who had been able to continue their quiet life in Nice virtually undisturbed by the war. They visited Italy, which had suffered terribly during the conflict; they passed through countries that had remained neutral and were untouched, like Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands; and they went to Belgium, where the traces of destruction were omnipresent. In late October 1919, they returned home from Cherbourg, France, on the SS Lapland, just in time to attend the ceremony at which Harvard was granting Teddy a posthumous bachelor of science for his “honorable war service.”

  Once home, Allene bought a country house with a large plot of land and its own little harbor in Roslyn, a coastal village not far from Lattingtown. She had it refurbished as a holiday resort and put the Greta-Theo Holiday House, as she named it, at the disposal of a New York association for single working young women. Over the following summers, she would be a familiar sight at the wheel of a truck filled to the brim with live chickens or cabbages and other vegetables from the farm at Birchwood, all intended for her protégées.

  Greta’s widower, Glenn Stewart, had found his own way of picking up the pieces of his life. In November 1919, barely a year after the death of his first wife, he quietly married Cecile “Jacqueline” Archer, the daughter of a wealthy missionary and businessman from Arkansas. Over the years, Glenn had become a thorn in the side of the diplomatic service. He came and went as it suited him, and the only time he handed in anything resembling a report, its quality was so abominable that his manager complained, “This is without exception the most careless and almost illiterate document I have ever seen.” Not long after his second wedding, Glenn was fired. Anson evidently saw no need to protect his son-in-law anymore.

  Incidentally, this time Glenn had chosen a woman who trumped him in terms of eccentricity. Jacqueline was in the habit of dying her poodles the same colors as the interiors of her Cadillacs, and in 1926, she’d make the society pages by giving the famous film star Rudolph Valentino a 177-pound Irish wolfhound she’d bred, valued at $5,000. In the end, the wealthy couple would withdraw in increasing paranoia to a fake castle on Wye Island, on the coast of Maryland, they’d designed themselves. It was from there that one day Glenn sailed off on his yacht into the deep blue sea and was never seen again.

  And so began a new decade as the Roaring Twenties burst out in all their vitality. In New York both skyscrapers and skirts reached new heights. Flappers—as fashionable young women would become known—cast overboard the corsets, long skirts, long hair, and social and sexual conventions of their Victorian predecessors. They went to jazz clubs to dance the Lindy Hop in honor of Charles Lindbergh, the first pilot who managed to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Twentieth-century consumerism spread to the farthest corners of America, and luxury goods that up to the First World War had been reserved for the very rich, like cars and refrigerators, were now within reach of the great masses. For $290 you could buy yourself a Ford Model T. Industry and prosperity grew, and New York definitively replaced London as the world’s financial center. America was now, indeed and indisputably, the greatest nation.

  These were busy years for Anson. In 1922, he was appointed vice chairman of the board of directors and CEO of the international branch of still-expanding General Electric. Aside from this, he had dozens of ancillary and volunteer roles in organizations, including the Automobile Club of America and the New York Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where he was chairman of the selection committee. Allene, too, kept herself busy. If she wasn’t accompanying her husband on one of his many business trips to Europe, she was active on the charity circuit, raising money in particular for veterans’ organizations and hospitals. She also made her name as an art collector; in 1921, she became a sustaining member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That same year, she made a comeback to the society columns from which she’d been practically absent for more than three years.

  Just as disabled war veterans were being fitted for artificial limbs or having masks painted to cover their mutilated faces, Allene seemed to be filling the hole in her heart with surrogate children—young people to whom she could offer the love she could no longer give Greta and Teddy. She became a kind of replacement mother for Jane Moinson, a young woman she and Anson had met in France in the summer of 1919. The only daughter of Paris surgeon Louis Moinson, Jane had just lost her own mother and could do with some care and diversion.

  In May 1921, after two consecutive winters with the Burchards, Jane was presented to the New York social scene, marking her coming-out as a debutante with a whole series of lunches, dinners, and even a ball organized by her hostess. Soon a suitable marriage candidate for the young Parisienne announced himself in the form of Cyrus W. Miller, a young engineer from General Electric. They married in June at a large wedding at Birchwood attended by more than three hundred guests.

  A year later it was the turn of another “daughter” of Allene and Anson. Kitty, who’d returned to the United States, had found new love in the person of banker and war veteran Henry Wallace Cohu. Wally, as everyone called him, had been one of the groomsmen at Jane Moinson’s wedding. They married in the summer of 1922 at Kitty’s parents’ house on Long Island. With the financial backing of the Burchards, who acted as silent partners in his firm, Wally then set up his own investment bank.

  And then there was the family of Allene’s cousin Julia Warner, the daughter of one of Allene’s father’s sister
s. She and Allene were only a couple of years apart in age and practically grew up together in Jamestown. Later, Julia married Charles Rosewater, the son of newspaper owner Edward Rosewater, who after a number of setbacks in business had decided to settle with his family in New York.

  The Burchards were particularly fond of the Rosewaters, and, curiously, their friends’ children were strikingly similar to the ones they had lost themselves. Julia’s elder child, Charlotte, was by a twist of nature the spitting image of Greta—the two could have been sisters. And her younger, Seth, was just as interested in engineering as Teddy had been and was determined to start work as an engineer at General Electric like his uncle Anson.

  As she and Anson assembled a replacement family around them, Allene’s own family crumbled. In January 1923, her mother died, followed two years later by her father. In both cases, their daughter traveled to the South of France to take care of them for the last few months of their lives. Jennette and Charles Tew were buried in La Caucade, the old Nice graveyard high in the hills, in the area reserved for English people, so far from the village near Lake Chautauqua they’d come from.

  Following the deaths of Allene’s parents, she and Anson made a new start. They sold the Allene Tew Nichols House on Sixty-Fourth Street, which was weighed down with memories, and bought instead an even larger and more exclusive building on Park Avenue, which in those years had definitively taken over from Fifth Avenue as the most desirable address in America. “If America has a heaven, this is it,” in the words of the liberal weekly magazine the New Republic in 1927.

  The new house, which took over the entire southwestern corner of Park Avenue and Sixty-Ninth Street, had been commissioned eight years earlier by banker Henry Pomeroy Davison, who had a country house in Lattingtown and was well known by the Burchards. The new house had five floors, ten master bedrooms, fourteen servants’ bedrooms, two elevators, and a built-in garage. After Davison’s death in 1922, his wife put the house on the market for more than half a million dollars—an amount almost impossible to drum up in those times.