“It was an electrical explosion,” the fireman explained, pulling my focus back with his hoarse voice. “Defective wiring in the master suite, from the looks of it.”
I met Ed’s eyes across the lawn as the words settled over me. Defective wiring in the master suite. All the money in the world—the fortune required to amass antique furniture and hand-painted frescoes and every custom comfort—and yet my beautiful mansion had been built on botched wiring. I could have laughed at the cruel, scorching irony of it.
But before I could laugh, I began to cough. The crowd around us had grown, and several people now looked at me in concern. I avoided their stares; I could barely stomach the thought of meeting the eyes of my stunned neighbors. “Oh, Marjorie, my dear girl.” A familiar voice: I turned and saw the earnest face of my friend Elsie Rockefeller, who stood among the group of observers. “What a horror. I am so terribly sorry.” With that, Elsie leaned forward and picked up the nearest piece of debris that littered my lawn. I gasped—it was a piece of lingerie, an article from my bridal trousseau. Just one of the hundreds of personal items lying scattershot on the grass, on full display for anyone to see, along with brassieres and corsets, lace slips and stockings.
Inside the burning frame of the house, firemen were shooting their hoses and vaulting our precious personal items through the shattered windows as if they were bailing a sinking ship—our dinner china, Eleanor’s baby portrait, my jewelry, Adelaide’s dresses. It all came falling from the sky, landing all around us. I leaned over and with quivering fingers picked up one of the many letters from Papa that I had saved. Beside that were the singed remnants of an old family photograph from Battle Creek, Mother and Papa standing behind me on what looked to be my fifth birthday.
The firemen were valiant, but within hours, The Boulders was nothing more than a pile of ash and scorched beams. And what of my life in Greenwich? What was there to rebuild? Mornings on the lawn sipping iced lemonade, watching the men play golf, gossiping about people and then seeing those same people that evening for dancing and cocktails at the country club—why rebuild for more of that? It felt futile to put all of that back in order. Papa had planned this house during the collapse of his own marriage; he’d intended for it to be a home that he and I would enjoy together, and that had never happened. Then it had been intended as the home where I could start my own family as a happy bride. But had I ever been truly happy at The Boulders? It was like the firefighter had said: the wiring there had been bad from the start.
Chapter 18
New York City
Summer 1917
I would not budge, and I would not hear Eddie’s suggestions to the contrary: I sold The Boulders property, and we made the mansion on Ninety-second Street our home. If my husband wanted space for the children to run and greenery to offset the commotion of city life, then space and greenery we could arrange. I bought the home next door and connected the two properties so that we had ample space both indoors and outdoors. With the added lot, we doubled the size of our garden, and the girls enjoyed roaming, climbing the small trees and digging in the dirt until their fingernails and petticoats turned a nice, filthy brown.
Refusing to lose any more time in regretting the loss of so many priceless and personal treasures that had gone up in smoke at The Boulders, I threw myself into refurbishing and decorating our New York City home. I ordered all new furniture for our family living rooms, custom from Paris. I found antique chandeliers and Gobelins tapestries to brighten the dark-paneled walls. I purchased cheerful Sèvres and Limoges porcelain, antique ormolu mantel clocks, and rich hand-carved end-tables topped with marble.
“I just hope it’s not…Only, I would hate for it to seem…gaudy.” That was the way Eddie reacted when I showed him a new suite of Louis XVI oak chairs and their matching table, freshly arrived at the house. With the help of several footmen, I was excitedly arranging them among the settee and sofa pieces in our drawing room. I shrugged off the barb; it would have been just as easy for me to retort that his family would never have been able to afford half of these gaudy pieces, regardless of their old Knickerbocker name, but what was the point? I had stopped agonizing over his approval, probably because I sensed that I would never get it. At least, not without giving up so many of the pieces of myself that I was determined to hold on to. And since we had lost so much in the fire out at The Boulders, I did not see the harm in replenishing our Manhattan home with the sort of timeless pieces that would make me feel happy and comfortable.