Ramona Ausubel: Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

Mary did not gain confidence as time went on. Instead, the more she learned of it, the more intricate the labyrinth became. Wallpaper and lighting were frequently torn out and replaced at great expense. The house, to Mary, was a series of landmines. If she was found to still have Queen Mary chairs six months after everyone had gone Arts and Crafts, her entire social existence might be blown up. And no matter how hard she tried, she could not find the right dish to serve at a dinner — the Old Moneys always served the same slab of grey beef with brown gravy and potatoes, and never enough of it, but Mary was far from established enough to pull that off. Many times Edgar came downstairs for a late-night snack after studying and found his mother asleep beside a stack of cookbooks. Beneath her head, a list of the pitfalls of each dish. Soufflé: falls. Lasagna: too Italian. Champagne and caviar: trying too hard. Lamb chops with mashed potatoes: fattening. Fish: the smell stays in the wallpaper for days.

Edgar woke his mother, draped her arm over his shoulder and put her to bed beside his snoring father. “Who cares what everybody thinks?” he whispered. “They’re just old rich people. They didn’t make the world.”

“Thank you, love,” she said. “But you’re wrong, they did make the world and they still do.”

* * *

THE MONEY IN FERN’S FAMILY was so old they only remembered the broad strokes of its origin (rum, cotton, slaves). This bloodstream, her parents felt, was not bought or earned. They were true Americans, men and women who had settled on this land before it had a name. Absent from their stories was even a mention of the people who had already populated the mountains and valleys when the early pilgrims had come ashore. As if, upon the arrival of men who considered themselves superior, the natives had quietly, obediently, evaporated into a cheery summer-camp fantasy — a young brave in a canoe with a tomahawk, a pretty topless squaw on shore wringing lake water from her hair.

Members of Fern’s Old Money family had met George Washington, served as Senators and international Ambassadors, seeded the burgeoning lands with their sons and daughters and cotton crops, tended to those children and crops with slave labor, a fact that they had ceased to mention by the time Fern’s generation had come along. The truest luxury of long-term wealth was that no one in the family thought about money anymore. As if comfort was joined with the Westwood cells. They had not earned anything new for a hundred years and no one went to college in order to get a job — instead they went to learn for the sake of learning, to deepen their reservoirs of language, culture, philosophy, art. They spent a significant amount of time giving money away.

Evelyn Westwood, Fern’s mother, was an accomplished sculptor. Her father, Paul, when not suffering from crippling migraines four days a week, spent his time serving on the boards of deserving causes. They lived in an eight-bedroom Arts and Crafts house on fifty acres of prairie a mile from Lake Michigan. They had two maids, a cook, a chauffeur and four Thoroughbred mares. Fern and her brother, Ben, had been raised by Irish nannies. In the attic were giant steamer trunks that the family had used many times to travel to Europe to look at art and architecture, to eat, to walk in Paris in the spring and Italy in the summer.

From the outside, Fern’s parents looked like the people Edgar’s parents hoped to become. Money was relatively easy to earn; status took generations.

But from the inside? Imagine Evelyn before Fern, Evelyn before Ben, Evelyn even before Paul: she had short hair though shoulder length was the style and naked lips though the girls were all slicking on red. Instead of a knee-length dress cinched at the waist she wore a red silk robe that was given to her mother by a Chinese empress. Her parents had built Evelyn, showing promise, a sculpture studio when she was fourteen, out in the prairie behind the family estate. Her parents were proud of her. Sculpture seemed perfectly safe — she made fawns, geese, children with watering cans — and the hobby seemed a nice complement to the rest of her grooming.

While all the parents thought about the Allies fighting Germany and Japan, Evelyn’s friends spent whole evenings in Lolly Roitfield’s fourth-floor turret parsing the football roster, taking the boys’ bodies apart in their minds like doll bits and restacking them into a perfect configuration — Chip’s chest, Edward’s height, Albert’s legs, Theodore’s hair and the beatific face of Crosly Marsh. They dressed this perfect man in a leather football helmet sometimes, then a suit and fedora, then, if they were feeling brave, a pair of swimming shorts with a backdrop of Lake Michigan in full heat, a gingham picnic blanket and all the girls in two-piece swimsuits despite their mothers’ best efforts to force them into the woolen bathing dresses of their youth. But while the other girls constructed boys, Evelyn sat to the side, not because she was shy or unwanted, not because she did not think about boys, but because she liked the angle. She had a sketchpad out and she too was creating bodies. The group of girls on Evelyn’s page were both fluid and precise.

By graduation, a few girls already wore little sparklers on their ring fingers. They had been debuted in white charmeuse and shantung silk, bent into deep curtseys while the gentlemen of society had scanned the line. The girls who would go to college went because that was where they would meet the right men. There they would stay up late talking about which courses attracted which boys. Evelyn applied to all the same colleges but she also applied to the Art Institute. Her parents debated whether to let her go — she was not pretty enough to coast on looks — but in the end it was their status that gave them confidence. Theirs was one of the oldest families in Chicago. Their house, built by Evelyn’s grandfather, was pictured in more than a dozen books on architecture. Their rosebushes were so old that some of the branches were as big as ankles and when they bloomed they were just imperfect enough, as if someone had come out at dawn and carefully ruffled them. This was a family of such polish that Evelyn was desirable even if she showed some talent.

At school she was twice as good as all the men. The teachers always looked at her work with bright eyes, then at her. They squinted like they were trying to bring her into focus — was she really a girl? Too bad.

The only teacher who took her as seriously as she deserved to be taken, who lent her rare and expensive books on sixteenth-century sculpture, who stayed with her after class, the room still earthy with wet clay, the grey chalk of it in their nailbeds, talked about a carved medusa he had seen in Istanbul and how it reminded him of her. She thought he meant her work, but no.

“You have that same fire,” he said. “Wrong hair, though.” She touched her flat locks, short against her skull. She changed the subject to the magic trick of sculpting eyes. “You have to think of the eyes as gesture more than organ,” he said, flicking his wrist. And then, without wondering if he had earned permission, he leaned in and kissed her with his whole wet mouth and all the compliments he had ever given her on her clay, the way she had summoned the reclining nude, how he had almost been able to feel her deer breathing, all of that was snuffed out. It was gesture. She was a woman and that fact would always matter more than talent. She would always matter less.

Evelyn had to get married if she wanted to keep working. It was 1944 and there was no place in the world for a single woman artist, at least not in her world. She had plenty of suitors and her parents pushed for a van der Rohe, a Tisch or a Kensington, as if they were all choosing a new accessory rather than a human with whom their daughter would spend all her remaining nights and days. Evelyn searched the men for the most benign, the least likely to pay attention. Paul had a firm jawline, the family stock was decent, the house a little new but not embarrassingly so, but her parents had eliminated him because he was crippled with frequent and debilitating migraines, headaches that made him blind, unable to speak. Evelyn felt sorry for him, suffering so, but it was the migraines that made her pluck him out of the reject pile — on the days when he had headaches she would be nearly husbandless, nearly alone. Indeed, for all their years together, when Paul noticed the first glimmer at the outer edge of his vision, Evelyn made him a cup of strong tea, settled her husband in the bedroom with a cold cloth and drew the velvet drapes. Then she walked out to her prairie studio and fell into the clay as if she was nothing but a glorious pair of hands.