Seized by the Sun Read online

  The move was completed in 1927. The house at 174 Summit Avenue was more imposing than the old place in Jersey City. Gertrude fell deeper into a depression, and her father worried that she might have inherited Laura’s condition.

  Often Gertrude said she felt ill, and she spent the day in her bed reading. When she did trudge to school, she dragged home at the end of the day and buried herself in her novels and poetry. It was a gloomy existence, and the only lift she got was from her books. During her junior year of high school she was often absent, and she did only what she had to do to pass her courses. Her teachers pressed Vreeland to challenge the girl. Her senior year was the same. She refused to speak in class and read her novels instead of her texts. One teacher said she should be expelled, and for a few weeks this threat seemed to rouse her to do better work, while making her feel worse than ever.

  When boys tried to talk to Gertrude, she turned them away with a shake of her head.

  At age 18 her stutter was as bad as it ever was. She never wanted to visit another specialist again. Vreeland, persistently pursuing every avenue of relief, took Gertrude to a psychiatrist in New York City, Dr. Margaret Kenworthy. The psychiatrist refused to allow the parents in the room during her sessions with their daughter. The doctor asked who Gertrude liked best in the family, and then who was next, and so on down the line of siblings.

  “It was a disaster. Instead of helping, it turned the family upside down. Gertrude became defiant and independent. She threatened to quit school,” said Elizabeth.

  Dr. Kenworthy told Vreeland that Gertrude needed to be away from the pressures of her family and recommended she spend time on a farm in the country. Vreeland had sold Glenbrook Farm, so he sent his daughter instead to be with a family on a farm in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley region of western Virginia, but he never took Gertrude to Dr. Kenworthy again.

  In the spring of 1930, when Gertrude arrived at the farm, flowering trillium plants would have covered the hardwood slopes of Virginia’s mountain ridges, lending a frothy look to the famous indigo hue of the hills. The oak and hickory forest and mountain laurel would have formed tunnels over the twisting roads, and pink rhododendrons would have glowed like spirits in the thickets.

  At the farm, Gertrude made a friend of one of the local girls, according to Elizabeth. Together, they may have explored the Shenandoah’s hollows and hillsides and spotted or heard stories about native plants such as chicory, yarrow, and butterfly weed said to have healing properties. The locals must have warned her about wild boar, bobcats, copperheads, and timber rattlers.

  Gertrude’s stay on the Virginia farm coincided with the start of the Great Depression in America. During the Depression rural poverty touched everyone. A farm’s chickens and cows provided an important part of the family diet. Dresses were made of feed bags. Many people went shoeless. City residents drove to the country to barter used clothing for fruits and vegetables grown by the farmers. There was one important cash crop in Virginia: distilleries hidden in the backwoods supplied an abundance of whiskey. Drinking alcohol was illegal in America from 1919 to 1933. During Prohibition drinkers turned to rural bootleggers for illegal alcohol, called moonshine.

  Gertrude’s family welcomed the peace that came with her exile. They hoped that their troubled girl from the industrial thickets of New Jersey might begin to find herself in the mountains of Virginia. Her sister said that while Gertrude claimed to have hated her year in Virginia, it clearly stimulated her interest in farming and gardening. Nature seemed to focus her. Sometime during her year there, she filled out an application for admission to the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women. It was located in Ambler, just north of Philadelphia. A small school, it seemed safe and personal. In spite of her mediocre high school grades, Gertrude was accepted at Ambler.

  Vreeland, whose other daughters were at the prestigious colleges Smith and Wellesley, exclaimed, “And you want to be a farmer?” Her mother intervened on Gertrude’s behalf, saying, “It’s the first thing she’s taken a serious interest in, and she should be allowed to enroll in the school.” Vreeland relented and supported his daughter at Ambler.

  Gertrude arrived on the Ambler campus dressed in a suit, hat, and gloves. Her mother and father accompanied her, and the Cadillac carried her suitcases and a steamer trunk, a large wooden box with a rounded top that was banded with leather or more wood to make it sturdy.

  The Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women was founded in 1910 by June Bowne Haines, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, which is also located near Philadelphia. Bowne Haines had visited several English gardening schools earlier in the 20th century and determined that horticulture should be part of American education. She acquired an initial 71 acres with the financial support of friends. The school flourished, attracting students from Germany, Australia, and even Japan. In 1929 the school built its first campus dormitory.

  The year 1930 was not the most auspicious time for Gertrude to arrive at college. The Great Depression was spreading economic misery. Though many causes contributed to the Depression, the stock market crash in 1929 was the lynchpin of a calamity that was felt around the world. The unemployment rate soon reached 25 percent of all Americans. Men lost their jobs and couldn’t buy food. Banks failed. For women workers conditions were terrible. In Chicago, women workers were paid less than 25 cents an hour, and one-fourth of them received less than 10 cents an hour. In some states tax revenue was so low that school was conducted only three days a week. The British economist John Maynard Keynes was asked if there had ever been anything like the Depression before. “Yes,” he said, “it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years.”

  On arriving at Ambler, Gertrude and her fellow students were restricted from taking baths due to the drought, which was “terrible all over,” as Gertrude wrote to her sister Elizabeth in a lengthy letter dated October 26, 1930.

  Elizabeth was having an adventure of her own, teaching at the American School for Girls in Damascus, Syria. While visiting friends in Lebanon, she had met Guy Whittall, a manager for Royal Dutch Shell. They were married on November 18, 1930.

  Gertrude wrote Elizabeth about how they unexpectedly received relief from the drought in the form of rain that lasted all night, and the girls gathered in the recreation hall. One of them composed a “hymn to mother rain.” Soon the girls were heartily singing, and Gertrude joined, never fearing her stutter when in song. There was a comic quality to this moment of bonding, and in the letter to Elizabeth she conveyed a newfound if tentative happiness. Her fellow students were friendly, and if any of them made fun of her stuttering she made no mention of it.

  Gertrude described her studies: “We must learn at least three Latin names for every vegetable, tree, flower and bug. The bugs are the worst: [I] hate the things anyway and to hunt for them is awful.” She was introduced to double digging, a system whereby the gardener digs two spade lengths into the soil to turn it.

  On the weekend, she related, she went to a movie in Ambler and saw All Quiet on the Western Front, a film about a German soldier’s experiences during World War I. “It was ghastly in some parts, but not as bad as the book.”

  She found other Ambler students who shared her love of tennis, but the school’s clay court was lumpy and needed compressing. She expressed her regret to Elizabeth that she would never “catch up to you at the rate my tennis is progressing.” She also asked, “Have you ridden a camel or an Arabian horse yet?” and “Have you had any real Syrian food?”

  Unseasonably cold weather came with the rains, which meant Gertrude was stuck in her dorm room or the recreation area much of the time. “I am making mittens violently and knit all the time when I ought to be doing something else.” She drank tea with her closest friend at Ambler, Mia Ely, and together they listened to the popular New York Philharmonic Symphony on the radio every Sunday afternoon, “Just like we were at home.”

  She mentioned other friends. “Peggy Bean is the nicest girl in school. She is a senior. She is
the kind of person who is darling to everybody and it comes perfectly naturally. By the way, she is my hair dresser and washes my hair almost as well as you do. We have lots of fun doing it in the tubs in the basement and using a watering can to rinse it.” A Chinese student, Chi Chow, prepared chow mein for the girls, but it made them all ill.

  Gertrude wrote about her introduction to animal husbandry. The school kept a herd of about 10 cows, and the young women watched the birth of a Jersey bull calf, “the sweetest little bull there ever was. Nearly all the cows are expecting a calf sometime in the near future, which is a very exciting prospect.”

  She described a slice of her life at Ambler:

  I made a compost pile. The latter is quite an art. It must be absolutely square and about four feet high. It was made from a heap of rotten vegetables, chicken manure, dead mice and … everything imaginable all put between layers of decaying straw. It must be stamped down once in a while to get it packed solid…. Then in floriculture we transplanted peonies. Slews and slews of them, and you know how deep peony roots go…. We have been making cider quite a bit lately. It is lots of fun but awfully hard work turning the press, but I am glad it is because I’d like to have really strong arms.

  If you find any lotion or anything like that in Damascus to make hands beautiful please let me know as mine are perfect sights. My fingers are all getting full of little black lines. The only saving grace is doing lots of laundry but we aren’t supposed to wash anything now on account of the drought.

  At the beginning of Gertrude’s second year, a number of her friends did not return to Ambler. The Depression had the country in its grip, and many students could no longer afford to attend. However, there were still wealthy people in America who were untouched by the Depression. Barbara Hutton, heiress to the Woolworth dime store fortune, had a coming-out party at the Ritz Hotel in New York City in 1933 that cost $1 million in today’s currency. Famous singer Rudy Vallee provided vocals, and the guests danced to four orchestras. Eucalyptus and silver birch trees were imported from California for the evening. A list of the rich and famous in attendance included the Astors and the Rockefellers, both families of great wealth.

  The Depression and Music

  The music business came close to collapsing during the Depression. In Chicago, shivering, jobless men burned old phonograph records to keep warm. American record companies, which had sold more than 100 million copies a year in the mid-1920s, were selling just 6 million by 1933.

  Swing—a type of jazz but with a new name—became popular. Dances included the big apple and little peach, the shag and Susy Q, and the dance that had started it all—the Lindy hop. They would all become known as jitterbugging.

  The melancholy sounds of “Happy Days Are Here Again” and Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” expressed hope for better times.

  Vreeland’s Smooth-On business was not yet feeling the economic pinch. Early in the Depression it was frequently cheaper to maintain older cast-iron equipment than to purchase it new. However, cast iron was giving way to steel, aluminum, and other new metals and alloys. Even in decline, Smooth-On did well enough that Vreeland was able to continue to provide the family with a comfortable living and pay for Gertrude’s schooling. She graduated from the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women and was named in school records as one of the founders of the Woman’s National Farm and Garden Association, New Jersey Division.

  After Ambler, Gertrude made a brief visit back to Virginia. Perhaps she saw the terrible effects of the Depression in the rural communities there: skinny children, tattered clothes, cars parked where they ran out of gas and now providing nests for chickens and spiders. Men hunted out of necessity, and if they got a squirrel, the family ate stew. If not, they ate boiled dandelion greens. As she drove along the Shenandoah in the Chevrolet her parents had given her, she must have passed dozens of abandoned farms.

  Politically, Gertrude found herself in conflict with her father, who was a vocal critic of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. In spite of President Herbert Hoover calling him “a madman,” Roosevelt was elected in a landslide over Hoover in 1932. For Gertrude, Roosevelt seemed the only hope for millions. She and Elizabeth both shared Roosevelt’s view that every American should have four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Vreeland, a captain of industry, a board member of Rutgers University, and a conservative Republican, felt unsettled by his daughter’s progressive views and wondered if the Communists had influenced the Pennsylvania horticultural school. “One Roosevelt was one too many,” he grumbled, referring to an earlier Roosevelt president, Franklin’s distant cousin Theodore.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man immobilized by polio in 1921, thundered into action when he became president in 1933. His first 100 days were a whirlwind of activity. He gave 10 major speeches and created a dozen new agencies designed to fight the Depression. He herded through Congress 13 major pieces of legislation, including insurance for all bank deposits, refinancing of home mortgages, Wall Street reforms, and authorization for nearly $4 billion in federal relief. He ended Prohibition and legalized the public sale of alcohol. He passed laws creating the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

  “Take a method and try it,” he said. He was improvising. Some of his actions would help, some would be found unconstitutional, and some would be ineffective. He would be reelected four times and would see America through the most difficult part of the 20th century.

  Gertrude was inspired by Roosevelt. His handicap hadn’t stopped him. Why should hers? She became more confident and assertive, and she was moved to seek new adventures.

  4

  TRAVELING ABROAD

  For young women of wealth, it was common to travel after graduating from college. Gertrude’s family encouraged her to see Europe, and she finally agreed with a vague plan of visiting the sites where her ancestors had lived in England and Holland. Like most young American women from wealthy families, she was accompanied by a traveling companion: her aunt.

  Once aboard a steamship, Gertrude became captivated by the idea of her passage through time and across the sea without having to meet the expectations of others. The water hissing beneath the hull of the ship soothed her, and the moon reflecting off the Atlantic felt romantic. Gertrude doubted she would ever marry. Her speech impediment would see to that. She agreed with Vreeland that perhaps her speech problems were inherited, and she thought it would not be a good thing to bring another stuttering child into the world. Besides, she felt undesirable, and she avoided the young men who tried to approach her on the ship. She would keep on traveling, keep ahead of the pain that human beings brought into her life. She liked creatures, plants, and trees better than humans, anyway.

  Traveling Companions

  Traveling companions, also known as a lady’s companion, existed until as late as the mid-20th century. A companion was usually someone from the same upper social strata as the woman she was paid to accompany. She was expected to make conversation and be sociable. She was not a servant but rather served as a chaperone and was assumed to be someone who could intervene in case of unwanted male attention.

  For example, in the 1908 novel A Room with a View by E. M. Forster, Miss Bartlett was Lucy Honeychurch’s cousin and was enlisted to accompany her on a trip abroad.

  In London she found herself part of a group of tourists from the ship that clung together like a herd of sheep, hurrying from cathedral to cathedral. After visiting Kensington Gardens on a cold and gloomy day, she felt depressed and restricted by the group. The garden visit had given her an idea, stimulating her courage to see things she had read about at Ambler.

  Early the next day she and her aunt quietly slipped away from their hotel. By midday they had crossed the English Channel on a boat. They took a train from Calais to Paris, where Gertrude immediately fell in
love with the elegant gardens that graced the City of Light. She strolled in the Garden of the Royal Palace. She was enchanted by the tiny Square du Vert-Galant near Notre-Dame. She spent her days marveling at the gardens of the Tuileries and Versailles, as well as the Luxembourg Gardens. “She fell in love with all of it,” said her sister Elizabeth.

  One of her subjects at Ambler had been Renaissance gardens, and her fascination with them led her south to Italy. The gardens of Italy enchanted her. She sketched for hours, admiring the symmetry, the clever designs in stone and greenery, the subtle glow of opening flowers, the cascading water, the precise stonework that harmonized with the water features. She took notes, moving each day to a different garden, feeling rich with new knowledge and experience.

  Sometimes a garden’s owners would see the young American scratching away in her notebook, and frequently she was asked to have tea or dine with them. Often the locals provided a history of the gardens that she would never have gotten from her textbooks. She gained a new confidence and rapidly picked up Italian—stutter-free. That was another benefit of travel: she never stuttered in a foreign language. In Rome she visited the Vatican Gardens, the decaying estates of Maxentius’s country house on the Appian Way, and the expansive Villa Borghese gardens.

  The Roman Forum stunned her with its ancientness. She liked these ruined gardens best, the ancient remnants of pillars—some tumbled, some broken—on which sprouted grasses and shrubs. She sat beneath a wisteria, marveling at its huge and ancient trunk, the way its purple and pink blossoms entwined the columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux. Perhaps she heard the echo of the ancient Roman voices. She may have felt sad for Emperor Claudius, also a stutterer, as she gazed on the crumbling House of Livia, dedicated to his cunning and probably murderous stepmother.