Sargent's Women Read online

  Though raised in entirely different circumstances, Elsie’s and Leo’s childhoods bore uncanny similarities. Both had famous fathers: Elsie’s, a celebrated war hero and business tycoon; Leo’s, a magnetic Spiritualist who presided over a decidedly odd household where psychic experiments regularly took place. Young Leo—both mesmerized and terrified—would find himself in the middle of séances and other paranormal events. The two fathers were also authoritarian and distant: Frederic Myers, lost in his mystic realms, and the General often on another continent. In contrast, the two mothers doted on their children. Queen enveloped Elsie in a world of costumed pageantry. Eveleen took up photography, had a darkroom built, and absorbed Leo into her new undertaking. As a young boy, he became a subject for her camera. In two images titled The Compassionate Cherub, he poses shirtless, with wings attached to his shoulders. (In truth, he looks more forlorn than compassionate.) Leo would watch as his mother photographed some of the most eminent figures in Victorian society, among them, William Gladstone, the prime minister of England.

  Eveleen had brought her camera with her to Colorado and she photographed the camping party in front of a tent. The General stands with his daughters and other members of the group, but Elsie has defiantly turned her back to the camera. Why she refused to show her face is unknown, but it is indicative of a steely resolve she exhibited only rarely. For the most part, she was the ever-dutiful daughter and helpmate.

  At some point during the excursion in Colorado, Leo abruptly asked Elsie to marry him. She declined. Perhaps her father—whose feet were solidly planted on terra firma—objected to the very idea of his daughter marrying a psychic explorer. Or maybe Elsie’s thoughts floated back to the idyllic, though inaccessible, Peter Harrison. Leo and his mother returned to England, but Leo would appear again later in Elsie’s life.

  The following year another interesting English visitor came to Glen Eyrie: twenty-four-year-old Doll Carr, whose mother had fashioned Ellen Terry’s dress of beetle wings. She stayed for nine months. Doll arrived just in time for Christmas 1902 and kept a diary of the extraordinary world out West and daily life at Glen Eyrie, where a dozen or more guests around the dining table were not uncommon. After dinner, they would play charades, or the General would narrate his adventures in the Civil War—an event they called “Battleground.” It was “a war of boys,” he explained, and at the age of twenty-five he was a colonel and the oldest man in his cavalry regiment; by twenty-eight he’d earned the brevet rank of brigadier general. He was captured as a spy, briefly imprisoned in Richmond, and was later awarded the Medal of Honor. Ironically, he and his family were devout Quakers from Philadelphia. After the war, the Philadelphia Quakers sought a formal apology from Palmer for having fought. Refusing to apologize, he wrote a letter passionately defending his actions.

  Until her early twenties Elsie had lived under the wing of her mother. Art, not war, was discussed at her dinners. With the General at the helm, the conversation was much rougher: talk about mountain lions and bears roaming in the canyon behind the house, about stagecoach robberies and lynchings. Doll was horrified at the lynching of African Americans and how commonplace it seemed to be—“probably 50 or 60 since I have been in America,” she wrote after having been in the country for only about three months. A lynching had even taken place near Glen Eyrie. “Only 2 years ago they burnt a negro outside Colorado Springs & everyone concerned kept a bit to testify to their having been there.” The idea of taking a souvenir—a singed piece of flesh from another human being—revealed a darkness beneath the civilized surface of American society, she wrote. The General was appalled by the gross mistreatment of African Americans, and, despite his own military background, he hated the brand of American imperialism that resulted in the Spanish-American War. One evening after dinner the General insisted that Doll read aloud a graphic account of wartime atrocities recently committed by American soldiers. She burst into tears at the horror of it.

  Languishing in the Rocky Mountains, her social life practically nonexistent, Elsie couldn’t help but think of her former life in England. With no notion that his daughter had a long-distance crush on Peter Harrison, Palmer unwittingly delivered Elsie to the arms of her seducer in the summer of 1902. The General brought his daughters to the Swiss Alps for a reunion with their old friends Sargent and Harrison. At the end of the trip Elsie, who had just turned thirty, remained in England with her sister Marjory for nearly six unchaperoned months. Harrison, though still married, happily volunteered to escort the sisters from London all the way back to Colorado. In mid-May 1903, they arrived in New York and the love-struck Elsie and Peter spent two glorious days together in the city, what Peter would call “that burning time” when “I touched the sky . . . and lost myself in you.”

  What Elsie and Peter didn’t know was that there was a double agent in their midst: twenty-one-year-old Marjory had been instructed by her sister Dos to keep her eyes open and to let her know all that Elsie and Peter did.

  A keen student of emotions, Peter found a Shakespearean complexity in the shifting, ambiguous role-playing of the Palmers. He compared the General and his offspring with King Lear and his daughters. Brusque, efficient commander of all external events, the General seemed blind to his daughters’ emotional lives. Queen had controlled the heart and soul of the family and had forged an intimate, almost secretive connection with Elsie. Perhaps as a result, Elsie—driven by duty to her mother, then her father and sisters—developed an introspective, subdued personality. In contrast, Dos and Marjory were always more carefree and social. Dos, the most vivacious and beautiful of the sisters, looked upon Marjory as her soulmate. “My Marje you are a part of me,” Dos wrote when recruiting Marjory as her spy—an adroit maneuver worthy of the Elizabethan stage. Always aloof from her younger sisters, Elsie seemed unaware that they were conspiring.

  After Elsie and Peter left New York—with Marjory watching in the background—they all proceeded to Colorado. Peter stayed at Glen Eyrie for about four romantic months. There were furtive walks with Elsie in the dark, and secret meetings in the wild, rocky landscape. “Oh! For a day on the wolf trail with you, little Elsie.” Meanwhile, the General was apparently oblivious to the reality under his roof: that his eldest daughter was involved with a married man.

  It turned out that the mysterious young woman on Sargent’s canvas with the blank expression—the one who seemed to be attached to her mother to an almost unhealthy degree, or else under the thumb of an overbearing father—had fiery passions bubbling beneath her serene surface. Perhaps Sargent posed Elsie, consciously or not, in front of that dun-colored linenfold paneling in an ancient chapel because he sensed that she harbored an interior world that was almost religious in its intensity. The narrowness of those wooden linenfold strips seem to echo the restrained and dutiful role the Palmers had imposed upon Elsie. But Sargent’s painting also suggests that there were mysterious layers beneath that flat surface—and Peter tapped into those. In a letter to Elsie, Peter wrote that he and Sargent had discussed her portrait and that they both liked “that very calm expression” of hers. “Do wear it,” Peter urged. “When it comes on your face, your lips seem like folded hands & I love it & rest in it. My dearest, I love & love you—let me say it.” As for his wife, “I am with her & yet far away at the same time, for I belong to you.”

  After Peter left Colorado, their romance continued to burn in sensual, impassioned letters. Peter wrote nearly every day, pages and pages. The exchange of letters had distinct phases. There was the excruciating wait as the letters traveled by boat and then by train from England to Glen Eyrie. Would one arrive that day? Elsie never knew for sure. And then—utter joy—when an envelope from him was among the day’s mail. Elsie would seek out a secret place to read his letters, to savor each phrase, as he did with hers. He wrote that the torrent of letters “is life to me & without it the waters would close over me.” She counseled patience—one day they would physically be together. Yet at times Elsie wondered if it was right t
o be following one’s heart in this way. But signs of ambivalence seemed to only heighten Peter’s fervor, and his need for her. Increasingly brazen, Peter set out photographs of Elsie at his home in England, where his wife and visitors could see them.

  In the Colorado wilderness the younger sisters whispered, and probably counted the letters as they arrived in their crisp cream-colored envelopes with Peter’s distinctive script. Dos cast her net. Saying nothing to Elsie, she wrote to Peter—I see what you’re doing.

  Dos knows about us, Peter wrote to Elsie, and she understands the depth of our feelings toward each other. A new plot line was launched. Peter struck up his own parallel correspondence with Dos, and made no secret of it to Elsie.

  In his letters to Elsie, Peter frequently invoked Dos: her beautiful voice (like a “meadowlark”), her vivid and expressive letters. “Tell me of Dos: always,” Peter wrote to Elsie. When Elsie threatened to break off their relationship, he reminded her of the promises they had made to each other in New York, and he claimed that he had a presentiment he was going to die soon. From afar he stirred a rivalry between the sisters, telling Elsie how much love he had received from Dos. “For plain love I could not love you more than I do her,” but he assured Elsie, “the affinities between you & me are the wonderful extra bond.”

  Affecting a brotherly tone, Peter expressed worry over Dos’s future. Was she wasting her youth in a remote wilderness? Living in Colorado might ruin her chance to marry well, and prevent her from forging a happy life. Can you imagine “that Dos has only been 2 months in England in the last four years!!” Another snare was being set out. He begged Elsie to convince her father to send Dos abroad. “I believe you can do anything . . . with your ‘quiet way.’ ”

  In the spring of 1904 the General took his daughters on an extended tour of Europe, a shopping spree while renovations were taking place at Glen Eyrie. Peter could barely contain his excitement as Elsie crossed the Atlantic. His letters simmered with a renewed erotic charge. After the Palmers arrived, Peter went to Paris to set eyes on Elsie once again. He had to mask his ardor while in the presence of her family, but he secretly wrote to her while he was there, telling her how lucky he was just to be near her. “I am walking on the clouds & worshipping you . . . I feel such tenderness for you that at times I can hardly hold myself. . . . I can’t always ‘show’ tho’ I quiver with the desire to.” Elsie apparently shared his passion, for after a day alone with her, Peter called her a “poetess: for everything shared with you is true poetry. . . . Dear lovely Elsie, you scarcely seem of earth now: [you are] a wonderful pervading spirit.” He signed the letter “yr Señor who worships you.” (The same name—intentional or not—as the General’s favorite horse.)

  And yet within days there were signs that Peter’s gaze was straying. In another letter he referred to twenty-three-year-old Dos as his “standard,” and Elsie took offense. Peter tried to be jocular, but an undeniable note of jealousy crept into the correspondence. Did Peter, though thirty-seven (and married), prefer Dos’s youth to Elsie’s relative maturity? He adored seeing Elsie in Paris; but Elsie and Dos seemed to be on two different trajectories. Elsie, an unmarried woman in her early thirties, was losing her girlish charm. But Dos, so young, beautiful, and full of life, seemed to have an extra sparkle. Peter urged Elsie to send Dos from Paris to England.

  Elsie sent her. Dos stayed with the Harrisons one night in London with Peter stopping by her room to say goodnight. She was lying in bed with the window open and the moonlight flooding in. Peter wrote to Elsie, with knifelike cruelty, of how beautiful and happy Dos looked and how he noticed her “delicious lines of throat and neck. Ah! Elsie you haven’t got her now . . .”

  Soon, Peter’s letters to Elsie ceased.

  Elsie returned to Glen Eyrie aware that her sister—younger, livelier, and more beautiful—had betrayed her. Peter was now passionately attached to Dos, who traveled quite openly with him and his wife, Alma. It became common knowledge that Dos was his mistress. In a way, Sargent put his stamp of approval, or at least nondisapproval, on the round robin of relationships when he painted a languorous oil of Dos, Peter, and two other friends nestled together, asleep, in an alpine meadow in Italy in 1905. Alma, though on the trip with them, was conspicuously absent from the painting.

  From 1904 to 1906, the General was busily transforming Glen Eyrie’s original clapboard house into a sixty-seven-room stone mansion, the Colorado stone specially chosen for its rich patina. The General ordered limestone from Indiana for the doorways and window casings. The Great Hall had twenty-five-foot ceilings, and a balcony large enough for an orchestra to entertain three hundred guests below. The General loved technology and had electricity in the original house as early as 1882. He continued to install the most up-to-date improvements in his new castle: fire doors as a safety measure, smoke removal and central vacuum systems, an elevator, and telephones, among the first ones in the West. He built a modern creamery with pasteurization equipment he acquired from Louis Pasteur and imported a staff of dairy experts from Switzerland. The castle featured Turkish baths, a bowling alley, and a billiard room. Outside there was a tennis court and a pool for swimming in the summer, skating in the winter. The General built greenhouses where a team of gardeners raised rare flowers, fruits, and vegetables year-round. A rose arbor, a peaceful haven for Elsie and her sisters, was created in front of a backdrop of spectacular rock formations. The castle itself rose up amid towering pinnacles, as if it were an integral part of that landscape. Atop the castle’s stone tower the Palmers could survey their domain from a roof garden, featuring an enormous German bell that could be heard for six miles in the thin Colorado air. The General wrote of Glen Eyrie, “It seems to be a sort of paradise to which only the elect can be permitted to go.”

  Elsie seemed destined to be like some fairy-tale princess imprisoned in her Rocky Mountain castle. Like Queen before him, the General made no discernable effort to marry off his eldest child. He needed her. Her job was to welcome his business associates and old military comrades who might stop by, and to look after her younger sisters. His idea of introducing adventure into Elsie’s life was to bring her down a mine shaft. A woman inside a mine was practically unheard of out West. Miners were an extremely superstitious lot, and they believed that a female in their subterranean world meant impending doom; some miners would even refuse to go back into a mine if a woman had entered it. But the General, who had a financial interest in a number of mining operations, did what he liked. He was in charge. Elsie, who once led a cosmopolitan life with world-renowned artists and aesthetes, was now set in a world of miners and consumptives. The occasional social events and dances in town catered to a younger crowd—women in their teens and early twenties, like Dos and Marjory. By the time Elsie settled into the new stone castle with her father, she was practically considered too old for marriage. She’d missed her chance, wasting her time besotted with Peter.

  Old friends like Katie Dunham from New York visited Glen Eyrie, but that was a rare treat. In 1906, Elsie had to maintain a cheerful demeanor when Peter Harrison—without his wife, Alma—came for a lengthy stay and lavished his attention on Dos. The General organized one of his patented camping trips, and Elsie joined the party with Peter and Dos. What torture it must have been for her to watch as forty-year-old Peter glanced longingly at her young sister, or whispered to her behind a pine tree. Perhaps as a way to deflect suspicion over why he was staying at Glen Eyrie so long, Harrison created individual portraits of the three sisters while he was there. The artist, ever flirtatious and charming, managed to convince Elsie to sit for him; but she knew she had lost her place in his heart. The portraits were hung side by side in the mansion.

  The year ended tragically. On October 28, the General suffered a freak accident that changed his life—and Elsie’s. The seventy-year-old General, on one of his daily horseback rides, was thrown by his horse and landed headfirst. In an instant, he was paralyzed, all four of his limbs frozen and useless. The General or
dered that the horse be shot.

  Elsie had to step in and organize a household totally dedicated to the round-the-clock care of her father. A battery of doctors and nurses came and went. An X-ray machine was hauled to Glen Eyrie from Colorado Springs by a horse-drawn wagon, and the newly renovated castle became a virtual hospital. Surgery was ruled out as being too dangerous. The General was a man who craved activity and depended upon it. He became deeply depressed. Elsie grew so concerned about her father’s mental health that she summoned Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell from Philadelphia, a neurologist famous for his treatment of nervous disorders and “hysteria” of varying kinds. At first the General was furious that Elsie had invited Dr. Mitchell to Glen Eyrie and refused to see him. I’m not insane, he told his daughter. But as the days passed—and as Mitchell’s fees continued to pile up while he did nothing—the General finally relented and allowed Dr. Mitchell to treat him.

  The General grew resigned to his condition, but, with the help of Elsie, he refused to give up an active life. He ordered a “Stanley Steamer,” a white steam-driven car with a flashy red leather interior. The ritual of getting him into and out of the car was an ordeal, but the General insisted upon a regular schedule of drives. Servants carried him out of the castle in a kind of sling, put him on a stretcher or wheelchair, and then carefully fitted him into the backseat that was constructed of feathers and hair and contoured to fit him perfectly. With a chauffeur at the wheel and the top down, Palmer enjoyed drives all over the countryside at high speed.