Sargent's Women Read online

  But duty—not just to his immediate family, but to the large circle that depended upon him—was paramount to the General. In developing his railroad lines, he had surrounded himself with his wartime comrades, men he trusted implicitly, and he considered it his responsibility to maintain their good fortune. He was also supporting Queen’s extended family. After her mother died, Queen’s father, William Mellen, remarried and had a large second family, all of whom moved to Colorado Springs. When the Mellen patriarch died unexpectedly, the General stepped in as surrogate father to the second family—none of whom were particularly eager to work—and took over their financial support.

  The General was decisive and, especially as he got older, generally not given to introspection. He loved business. “There is some music in the inception of large enterprises,” he said. But in an uncharacteristic moment of regret, the General once apologized to his wife for their long-term separation: “And you my dear wife whom I have so often cruelly distressed & whose young affections I allowed to be Estranged because I was hard & cold & blind and stupid & wretchedly wrong altogether, and Reckless . . . [What] a heaven would life seem now, if with vigorous health, one had nothing to do but start without a penny to make a home for this beloved flock.”

  Palmer would never relocate to England, but in 1894 the General brought Elsie back to the United States. He wanted her to see her native country. She was thirteen when she left America. Now almost twenty-two, she was more British than American. On March 5 they boarded Palmer’s private rail car, the “Nomad,” in New York and set off on a tour of the States. Their rail accommodations included several servants and a marvelous cook. The train headed south, first to Washington, D.C., and then on through the hanging moss, palmettos, and cypress trees of Georgia and Florida. Father and daughter ate fresh oranges and took a glass-bottom boat tour. One of the Dunham sisters was in Florida, so she and Elsie sailed and traveled about together for a time. Then the train reversed course and headed north through Cumberland Island, Georgia (“Mrs. Carnegie’s place”), to Savannah and on to “George Vanderbilt’s place”—the French Renaissance-inspired chateau then being completed in the North Carolina wilderness near Asheville.

  From there, the Nomad headed west, with stops along the prairie so they could have “stately little walks in the wind.” Finally, on the afternoon of March 29 they reached Glen Eyrie. “The green rock wall looked as it always used to—as if it were the case to rich things,” Elsie wrote. A flood of memories rushed back: “Mothers love”; “Mother in a silk dress”; the smell of the piñon fires in the tower room, where Queen used to preside; “Motherling’s path.” Queen was everywhere.

  Two days after their arrival at Glen Eyrie, it snowed. When the sun peeked out, Elsie escaped to the private refuge she had used as a child: a seat in a corner of the estate near a gooseberry bush. The bush had grown, but everything else was unchanged. She listened to the call of an owl and the song of the “chromatic scale bird,” the sprightly house finch. Visitors came and went to Glen Eyrie and Elsie would frequently retreat to her perch in the wilderness in search of solitude.

  Colorado Springs’s transient population of invalids came in like the tide—and, oftentimes, never left. Among the latest arrivals was a literary celebrity from New York, Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, a writer and landscape critic with a patrician lineage who had brought her nineteen-year-old son, Gris, to Colorado Springs for his health. Van Rensselaer was astonished by the weather extremes and the sudden fluctuations in temperature, but took it in stride. “Even what seems bad weather here is good for throat and lung people,” she wrote. “It is always dry, and they say the cold and the wind are what brace people up best.” But as for the town itself, Van Rensselaer wrote dismissively that it was a “barbaric place where there is nothing to balance one’s mind or keep one’s pen in serious paths.” As the founding father’s daughter, Elsie was at the top of the social pecking order in Colorado Springs. So, despite her disdain for the town, Van Rensselaer dined with Elsie on the evening of April 19, 1894. Mariana’s fair-haired son joined them. That very day Mariana had written to a friend back East that her son was so well they would be returning home within a month. Only two days later he died. Death was a commonplace in Colorado Springs.

  The country Elsie had returned to was in the midst of an economic meltdown set off by the Panic of 1893, one of the worst financial crises in U.S. history. Unemployment was rampant. There were violent strikes. “Almost like a civil war going on in parts,” Elsie wrote while traveling in luxury on the Nomad with her father. They were back on the road again, traveling to the west coast. They stopped at mines en route to San Francisco, where they attended the World’s Fair at Golden Gate Park. For Elsie, the highlights of the exhibition were a chanting group of South Sea Islanders and a person claiming to be a vampire. In Salt Lake City the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints personally greeted them, though the Palmers did not share his religious beliefs. In the same city, they also witnessed an encampment of angry unemployed workers who marched through the streets chanting and demanding jobs. When a strike broke out at the Cripple Creek mine in Colorado, the General—experienced in the art of guerrilla warfare from the Civil War—was summoned by telegram to return immediately from Utah to take over the fight. Rumors reached them that six people had been killed; by the time Palmer got back, the state militia had restored order.

  Within six months Elsie was heading back to England, the place she considered home. She had a joyful reunion with her mother at Waterloo station, but as the autumn unfolded “black shadows were assembling like conspirators, in the orchards and under the spreading elms by the roadside.” It seemed an omen.

  In late October of 1894, Elsie received a “questionable letter” from Peter Harrison, the husband of her mother’s closest friend, Alma Strettell Harrison. Peter and Alma Harrison—constant guests and traveling companions of the Palmers—were practically family. Alma and Queen were the same age and had befriended each other when Alma visited Colorado Springs several times in the 1880s. Alma was a writer, and, like Queen, her interests revolved around music, literature, and the arts. She was part of the Sargent/Henry James/Ellen Terry set in London. (Alma’s sister designed the famous beetle-wing costume for the actress.) In December 1890, “Auntie Alma,” as Elsie called her, married the tall, thin, debonair Lawrence Alexander “Peter” Harrison. He was fifteen years younger than the bride, and only six years older than Elsie. On their marriage certificate Peter cited “gentleman” as his profession. Elsie attended the wedding with her mother and reported that the bride “looked sweetly interesting” in a “silver-grey poplin dress with yellow ribbons.”

  Peter was an artist who did more talking about his work than actual painting. He suffered equally from depression and from procrastination, and he exhibited few works in his lifetime. He was extremely jealous of his friend Sargent—the “Juggernaut,” as he called him—for his nonstop productivity. At Sargent’s Tite Street studio one day, Peter saw “heaps of watercolours lying about like cards,” which he dismissed as “all hopelessly clever but utterly without any thought.” He felt that Sargent was personally withholding secrets, “creeping away into inner rooms,” and didn’t have “the vitality to face things in himself.”

  “If he really faced things,” Harrison wrote, “he might be wiser and less exuberant.” Henry James once chided Peter about his attitude toward Sargent, saying that he hoped he’d “be converted to think more of John.” But Harrison also understood his own shortcomings and the manner in which a “strong man” such as Sargent would view him: “I feel every minute I am just the sort of man [Sargent] most despises—dilettante—dreamer & do-nothing.”

  Ironically, Peter Harrison is primarily known today as the subject of a series of informal paintings by Sargent, some of them “hopelessly clever.” A sensuous oil titled Group with Parasols shows Harrison napping in an alpine meadow with a group of friends, among them, Elsie’s sister Dos. And if you l
ook carefully at Sargent’s wall decorations at the Boston Public Library, you’ll also see Peter’s face as a biblical prophet. Saintliness was not exactly Peter’s strong suit. He had a roving eye for younger women. His “questionable letter” to Elsie was surely romantic—an inappropriate overture to the daughter of his wife’s best friend—for their relationship would later blossom into a torrid love affair.

  In mid-December 1894, Queen became ill with a bad cold—an “asthmatic attack,” Elsie called it—and cloistered herself in her room. On Christmas Eve, Alma and Peter Harrison arrived, songs were sung, and presents exchanged. But Queen remained upstairs. On Christmas Day, Elsie resorted to writing to “my own darling Motherling” since her mother was too ill to have any visitors, even her eldest daughter. Elsie assured her mother that she loved her Xmas stocking, the dress she had been given fit perfectly, and that all were having a marvelous day. “We feel your presence with us every second. It’s wonderful how you do that! And all your little thoughts for people’s pleasure come showering downstairs to every one . . . almost as if you were there.” Queen’s condition rapidly worsened and on December 27 Elsie cabled her father that he should come immediately. Queen died at sunrise the next morning of heart failure. She was forty-four years old.

  It took the General two weeks to reach his family. In the meantime, Elsie looked to Peter for comfort and support. The General had his wife cremated and her ashes buried in England, and declared his decision to bring his daughters back to Colorado. Elsie did not resist. How could she? Peter gave Elsie a gift, a small case containing a tintype of Motherling. Before leaving, the Palmers visited the Mote once more. Elsie wandered through the hallways and the gardens that held so many sweet memories. She had a long talk that day with Peter, who seemed to understand the depths of her misery. The loss of Motherling and their adopted home—the separation from Peter—it was all hard to comprehend. Peter, his wife, and a few other friends saw the Palmers off at the train station. Sargent, from London, sent Elsie his best wishes and his fervent hope that he would see her again in New York. The Palmers boarded the steamship and left Southampton on March 16, 1895. After the ship pulled out of the dock, Elsie, her father, and her two sisters remained on the deck and watched as the sun set and England disappeared from view.

  After nearly a decade of genteel British country life, Elsie—sporting an English accent and manners, and accustomed to a vibrant social life—was abruptly plunged back into the rough-hewn American West. Her two sisters, fourteen-year-old Dos and thirteen-year-old Marjory, had scarcely any memory of Glen Eyrie, a twenty-two-room clapboard house with the décor of a hunting lodge—buffalo, elk, and deer heads; animal skins; stuffed birds; bear robes; and Native American weapons. There could hardly be a greater contrast from the ancient manor houses the Palmer sisters had grown up in, where the walls were hung with Elizabethan portraits, tapestries, and other trappings of English aristocratic life. And the otherworldly landscape in Colorado bore no resemblance to the gentle hills and meadows of Sussex and Kent. A British friend of the sisters wrote that the wild countryside en route to Glen Eyrie “looks like the end of the world,” and “cannot be [the] same world that holds England!”

  In the 1870s the General had hired the Scottish-born landscape architect John Blair to design gardens and lay out pathways amid the fantastical obelisks and needles of red rock surrounding Glen Eyrie. Blair created ponds, rustic walkways with gnarled wooden benches, and arched bridges of local stone. Among the first things the sisters did upon their return in the spring of 1895 was to plant some flowers of their own, but the General’s pack of Great Danes dug up the seeds before they could sprout. Undeterred, the sisters created a “Sky Garden” in an all but inaccessible spot—perhaps in a rocky crevice above the ground—that could be reached only by ropes.

  Following Queen’s instructions, Elsie took on the role of substitute mother to her younger sisters, and helpmate and hostess for her father. Close upon arrival, Elsie moved into her mother’s private quarters at Glen Eyrie, had the room scrubbed clean, and the woodwork freshened with cedar oil. The spring mountain air blew in through a window that opened onto a tree. That very day a lost watch of her mother’s arrived mysteriously and without any note attached. It seemed to Elsie as if her mother were still with them.

  Elsie’s relationship with her father was entirely different from the deep spiritual bond she shared with her mother. Her first memory of him was as a rather forbidding figure: He was riding in the Colorado wilderness atop his steed, Señor, and she recalled his stern expression, his prickly mustache, his weather-beaten face, and his large hands, “freckled and a little awkward.” She also vividly remembered his leather riding boots, well-worn and misshapen after years of hard use. (The ones that Henry James would later scoff at in England.) The boots were stored in a cabinet in his bedroom. She’d been locked in that cabinet once as a child, a punishment for some long-forgotten infraction, and had sat in the dark with the boots as her companions.

  She looked up to her father—as all did—as “The General.” Though of only middling height, he possessed an aura of command and was widely admired in Colorado. Urged to run for governor, he declined. He was a man of principle, an empire builder, and a splendid rider and outdoorsman. The extensive network of rail lines that he built and the thousands of acres of real estate he acquired along the way made him exceedingly rich and powerful. The General would regale guests on his private rail car with stories of how he and his associates had arbitrarily created towns as they lay track through the West: “They would arrive with a town on the train & just plant it down anywhere that seemed convenient at the moment & call it whatever came into their head: if they wanted it further on afterwards they just took it up & again put it down elsewhere.” Thus little towns cropped up, one a “little forlorner” than the next.

  In his Colorado castle the “charming tyrant,” as one acquaintance called him, took command of Elsie’s and her sisters’ schedule. He planned every day in detail. A fitness fanatic, he believed that women should exercise regularly by raising their arms, doing deep-knee bends, and breathing deeply, all the while wearing “loose or no undergarments, in private with good ventilation.” The General organized picnics, riding expeditions, and vigorous wilderness hikes, always in the company of his pack of dogs and puppies, that could trip up hikers in the narrow mountain passes. The rugged and strange country made one English visitor yearn to float in a hot air balloon high above the landscape to get a proper perspective. The panorama didn’t make any sense to her. She pronounced that the mountains and valleys of Switzerland looked like a landscaped garden compared with the jagged outcroppings of Colorado.

  Elsie served as the hostess at Glen Eyrie for a constant procession of guests, many of them eager to discuss business with the General: railroad men and land speculators, well-born Britons with money to invest, governors and other political figures. Visitors would sign the guestbook at the house. Most of those who came and went were interested in the General only. They wanted to strike deals with him, or ask favors of the powerful magnate, or reminisce about the Civil War. These men paid little attention to Elsie, and, in turn, she surely found them deadly boring. She was used to artists and spirited intellectual conversation; at Glen Eyrie the talk was mainly taken up with railroads, mining, and money. But on December 30, 1901, a decidedly unconventional pair from England arrived at Glen Eyrie and penned their names: Eveleen Tennant Myers and her twenty-year-old son, Leo Myers. Eveleen, dressed entirely in black, was in mourning for her recently deceased husband, Frederic W. H. Myers, a renowned figure in the Spiritualist movement that had taken hold in Britain and the United States. Eveleen and Leo were in the United States on a bizarre mission: they believed they were going to have a posthumous meeting with their dead husband/father. One of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, Frederic Myers had been convinced that he would be able to reach out from beyond the grave. He had spent his life exploring all manner of occult and paranormal p
ractices; he had taken part in hundreds of séances; he had coined the terms supernormal and telepathy. Before he died, Frederic instructed his wife as to where and when they would meet in America. She followed his directives—but he failed to turn up. Leo, however, underwent his own spiritual transformation in a Chicago hotel room, where he was convinced he had a mystical experience and touched the “Infinite.”

  Mother and son made a long detour to Colorado to visit the Palmers, whom they’d known in England. The Myerses were at the center of intellectual and artistic life in Cambridge—just the sort of aesthetes that appealed to Queen, and appalled the General. In the midst of their psychic quest in America, Leo and his mother experienced a different kind of reality in Colorado: a camping trip organized by the General in which Spiritualism played no role whatsoever. Like a commanding general, Palmer controlled every aspect of his camping expeditions. A “platoon” of servants accompanied the treks, cooking up steaks from Denver, and pouring fine wines for the guests every evening. By day, there was no idling around the campsite. Rain or shine, the party would set off on a tour, with the General issuing directives.

  Elsie accompanied the group and apparently struck up more than just a friendship with Leo. Given how rich she was, Elsie, at twenty-nine, should long since have been married. Such was the custom in the Gilded Age. But Colorado Springs, where people came to die, did not offer much in the way of marriage partners. Peter Harrison remained her romantic, idealized soulmate, but he had a wife and he was on the other side of the Atlantic. Elsie considered Leo a boy—he was nine years younger—and rather delicate, but he had a sweetly handsome face, with curly hair parted in the middle. A cerebral soul drawn to the mysteries of the occult, Leo was the polar opposite of her father. Perhaps over the campfire, or when out of earshot of the General, Elsie and Leo exchanged confidences. Elsie, who felt the rustlings of her mother from the beyond, was doubtless eager to hear details of Leo’s otherworldly encounter in Chicago.