On the east side of the terrace, my uncle had enclosed the outdoor space and erected a Victorian conservatory. Inside the greenhouse, a fountain sprayed water into another of Tiffany’s fantasy creations, an iridescent mosaic-tiled pool surrounded by moss-covered rocks.
No matter the weather, we could sit on the rattan furniture among the palms and the orchids that my father tended like children, all thanks to the ingenious steam heating my uncle had installed.
Living there was healing, and I had finally started to feel like myself again when the third set of tragedies struck in early December. My uncle Percy died of food poisoning. He’d passed away during the night after a dinner, it was discovered later, that included oysters, which we all knew could sometimes be contaminated.
A week later, my father, who was only sixty-six and by all accounts extremely healthy, had a heart attack.
I had been out the morning it happened and returned home to find my father attended by Dr. Bernstein. He proclaimed it a mild attack and prescribed bed rest for two weeks, then a slow progression back to work.
My father chose to recuperate in the magical aerie at the top of Garland’s. Every morning, department managers would visit to go over the store’s issues and problems. Every afternoon, my mother and sister and Jack would arrive. At night, either Margery would make something or the Birdcage restaurant would send up dinner, and my father and I would eat on trays. He in his bed and me in the chair beside him.
After Father’s heart attack, my work felt even less important. The only thing that mattered was tending to him and helping him recover. I couldn’t bear to lose anyone else I loved.
But as it turned out, Dr. Bernstein’s prognosis was wrong. Eleven days after the first attack, late one afternoon, after my mother and sister and Jack had left, I was sitting by my father’s bedside reading out loud to him when he suffered another, much more severe attack.
I called Dr. Bernstein, who arrived within the half hour and saw my father alone. When he came out of the bedroom, he told me Father didn’t want to go to the hospital. A nurse was coming to help me. I argued for taking him to the hospital regardless, but Dr. Bernstein shook his head and took my hand and told me that it was more important to let my father be where he was most comfortable. I, who always asked questions, who dug deep for information, who never settled on one answer if there was more to discover, didn’t press. Nor did I ask if there would be any form of treatment. Or how much longer my father had. I didn’t ask Dr. Bernstein a single question, because I knew everything I needed to know, and everything I didn’t want to know, from the expression on his face.
I was with my father when he passed at nine that evening. Holding his hand, I watched his face and listened to his labored breath. How strange to be there when the soul takes flight. When a person goes from living to dead in a matter of seconds.
I never could have imagined what it would be like to see suffering calm. To see pain ease. My father didn’t have any last words for me during those hours. But we held hands, and his fingers kept a slight pressure on mine, so I knew he was aware of my presence. Eventually, his hand stopped holding mine, and I knew he was gone.
I’m not sure how long I stayed there beside him. A half hour? An hour? Even after the nurse tried to get me to leave my father’s bedside, I held his hand until I felt his flesh grow cold. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t warm him. He’d left me in silence without any loving last words of advice or wishes or farewell.
But we had talked a lot in the days before. Had he spoken like a dying man? I hadn’t thought so at the time. Rather, I thought he sounded like a man who had faced a crisis and it had made him contemplative. But looking back, I think he must have known how close he was to death all along.
The night before he passed, it was snowing. After our dinner, he said he wanted to have some port in the conservatory. He had seemed to be improving, and there was no reason not to indulge him. He walked a bit slowly but on his own, wearing one of the silk dressing gowns Garland’s sold in the men’s department. It was navy blue with a garland of green on the pocket and green piping along the edges. We sat under the gently falling snow, protected from the cold by thick glass and warm steam heat, and I thought he looked well, definitely less ashen than he’d been.
It’s always lovely in the greenhouse, but with a full moon turning the icy frost silver and the little votive candles that were scattered about the room, that night was magical. We sat, silent at first, enjoying the port and each other’s company, and then my father began telling me about my mother when they first met.
My father’s family had owned a farm in Ellenville, New York. They weren’t wealthy but were hardworking. When he began to shine in grade school, reading before most of his classmates and showing a great aptitude for math, my grandparents began to save up so they could give their only child the higher education he deserved.
Granville Garland did well enough in high school to get into Yale, where he majored in business with the hopes that he could turn his parents’ farm into an even more successful concern. Those plans were abandoned after he spent a summer in New York working for Theodore B. Starr at his downtown store on Twenty-sixth Street and Broadway. The shop sold jewelry, silver, and clocks, as well as paintings, furniture, and sculpture. He told me that he felt as if he’d woken up after a long sleep. And it was that summer he discovered his aptitude for selling and enthusiasm for a city retail environment, as well as a real love for being surrounded by beautiful things.
During his second year at Yale, Granville roomed with my mother’s older brother, Percy Winthrop, and they became fast friends. At the end of that term, Percy invited my father to his family’s summer house in Newport. He told me that when he arrived at the Meadows and met Percy’s sister, Henrietta March Winthrop, he was instantly struck by her beauty. She looked like a portrait by John Singer Sargent, he said, with her graceful figure, long neck, thick chestnut hair, and electric-green eyes.
“But it was her rebellious nature that made me believe I could be happy with her. She had such a fiery streak back then,” my father said with a half-hearted chuckle. “Your mother was studying art and very determined to be a painter. A powerful determination, just like you have, Vera. That’s why you two fight so much. She sees in you… the woman she might have been.”
I couldn’t imagine that. My mother was the epitome of a society matron. The proper fork was as important as her children’s happiness.
“What changed her?” I asked.
My father shrugged. “Once we were married, she settled into the life that she’d been born to live. On our honeymoon trip abroad, she gave up oils for watercolors, and although I didn’t realize at the time, that was a turning point. It wasn’t submission. She just didn’t need to become an artist anymore. She was Mrs. Granville Garland, and that, she once told me, was less arduous than struggling with her family to be taken seriously as an artist. I think as much as she yearned to make her own way, she just didn’t have the mettle or the strength to keep fighting. But you do,” he said.
“So she gave up her dream for the reality of homes and children and dinners and teas and gowns. As if her rebellion was a costume, and she just took it off?” I asked.
“Don’t judge her. Your mother was raised to conform. The effort to keep fighting in order to become someone else was too great for her in the end.” He paused. “And anyway, I don’t honestly think being that someone else would have made her any happier.”