In Memory of What Never Was

Wilderstein and the Suckleys: A Hudson River Legacy, by Cynthia Owen Philip. Introduction by Geoffrey C. Ward. Rhinebeck: Wilderstein Preservation, 2001.

If Cynthia Owen Philip’s Wilderstein and the Suckleys: A Hudson River Legacy, is as curiously moving as it is, it is because of a subtext that lies underneath the text itself. Published by the Wilderstein Preservation, the book seems, on one level, to be designed principally to satisfy visitors to the Rhinecliff estate who wish to learn more about the house and the family that lived in it. The writing is directed to a general reader, and it is animated by frequent citations from Suckley diaries and letters. Images brighten every page, and an eight-page insert of color photographs provides "A Tour of Wilderstein." One is encouraged to admire the beauty of the five-story round tower, the leather paneling, and the Hudson River views, as well as to enjoy vicariously the entertaining, traveling, and ice boating of its turn-of-the-century residents. Philip writes persuasively, "Of all of the handsome houses on the banks of the Hudson River, Wilderstein preserves most vibrantly the sense of the family who built it and made it their home" (127), and recollections of the estate’s comfortable veranda, grown-over tennis court, and shady gazebo might reinforce her words. At the same time, the book seems, on another level, to be designed to undercut any nostalgia that such visitors might feel towards this lost era. If the connection between the house and family appears to have been particularly intense at this estate, it was not because the Suckleys spent so many happy days together here, but, on the contrary, because they were absent from these environs for such lengths of time and unhappy even when they were in residence. The house retained its power for the Suckleys, as it does, by extension, for the visitor, because it represented and represents an ideal of family life that was never attained by those who inhabited it.

From the time of the original structure built on this land, Wilderstein appears to have both promised and failed to bring about the unity of the Suckley clan. In 1852, Philip tells us, Thomas Holy Suckley, who had inherited a fortune based in trade and real estate, constructed a modest Italianate villa on this site for his bride, Catharine Murray Bowne. Thomas’s son, Robert Bowne Suckley, was born in this house in 1856, but misfortunes soon followed. Robert’s older brother Rutsen died at the age of twelve in a fall from an apple tree, his younger sister Kittie succumbed to tuberculosis when she was nineteen, and his mother Catharine passed away soon thereafter. After Robert married Elizabeth (Bessie) Philips Montgomery in 1884, he showed little interest in remaining at Wilderstein or its neighborhood. The young couple departed on a two-year wedding tour of Europe and then settled in Orange, New Jersey, from which they seldom traveled up the Hudson River. Only after Thomas’s death in 1888 did Robert return to this region and the estate he had inherited. With his vast ambitions for the property, it might have been logical for Robert to take down the current house, but, Philip comments, "That Robert chose not to raze his father’s villa suggests that he was driven to rewrite rather than obliterate his often melancholy past" (22). The Wilderstein that we know was built out of the structure of an earlier, perhaps sadly remembered residence.

If Robert’s new, expensive mansion might seem to ensure the happiness of the family that would grow within it, these hopes would soon be disappointed. Philip details the architectural plans provided by Arnout Cannon, Jr., the landscapes plotted by Calvert Vaux, the interior decoration supplied by Joseph Burr Tiffany, all of which helped make the property as rich and delightful as it remains today. With seemingly infinite energy, Robert lavished care on the construction of the carriage house, the ice house, the boat house, the gate lodge, and the greenhouse; an enthusiast of all the recent inventions, he constructed his own power plant only a few years after electricity was first used in this country. Philip notes, "It might be quipped that Robert produced projects with the same regularity that Bessie produced babies" (36). Within the first nine years of her marriage, Bessie gave birth to seven children, of whom six would survive to adulthood. Yet this evidence of material and familial prosperity was deceptive. All of these expenditures placed strains upon the Suckley budget that Robert could ill afford, especially after the Panic of 1893, when his wealth diminished significantly. And all of this childbearing appears to have placed strains upon Bessie’s physical and mental health that she could ill support, especially given her husband’s apparent preference for his cigars, hobbies, and male friends over family life. The Suckleys moved into Wilderstein in 1890 and spent many of the following years improving the house, yet, by 1897, they could no longer afford to pay the servants required for maintaining their presence on the estate. In the hope of improving their financial state and Bessie’s well-being, they departed for Switzerland, where they would reside for the next ten years.

Even when the Suckleys returned to Wilderstein in 1907, the house seems to have represented more of a dream than a reality of a family house. In Europe, the children appear to have experienced an irregular upbringing, with their mother often residing in sanatoriums and their father often traveling in America, so that they received much of their formation from tutors and governesses at the hotel where they lived or teachers at the boarding schools they later attended. No sooner was the family united back at Wilderstein, however, than the children were sent off again to boarding school, the boys to Philips Exeter Academy and the girls to institutes in Stamford, Connecticut, and Riverdale, in the Bronx, ensuring that they would experience the Hudson Valley mostly during vacations. Separated from their mother, the children were still subjected to her fantasies that they were suffering from one illness or another, for which they were required to undergo various disagreeable treatments that set them off from their peers. On the one hand, it appears that the children actively sought to separate themselves from Wilderstein and the intrusive maternal care its symbolized. The boys moved to Cambridge, where they attended Harvard, and, later, New York City, where they sought to establish themselves as adults, in both places deterring their mother from joining them in order to tend to their imagined maladies. Henry (Nummie), the most ambitious of the boys, graduated from Harvard, settled into a solid financial house in Boston, became engaged to a girl he loved in Detroit, and, during World War I, developed an ambulance corps in Europe. Departing for France, he wrote, "You can’t expect, dear Mamma, to have your whole family with you always . . . . Everyone has to live his own life & cannot hope to remain peacefully at home always. My life does not lie at home now" (111). The girls moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia, where they also completed their educations and chastised their mother for interfering in their lives. Margaret (Daisy), the most serious of the girls, succeeded in passing Bryn Mawr’s rigorous entrance examinations and seemed to delight in the challenging work the college offered. She wrote to her mother, "We are old enough to be told things ourselves and not have a nurse running after us" (93). On the other hand, even as the children attempted to assert themselves away from home, the world outside Wilderstein did not always show itself to be a safe or welcoming place. Shortly after declaring that his life did not lie with his family, Nummie died in Albania, the victim of an explosion. Robert, Jr. (Robin) and Arthur were both expelled from Harvard and did not distinguish themselves afterwards, and the twins Katharine and Elizabeth (Betty) showed little inclination for study or self-application. At Bryn Mawr, Daisy wrote home, "This living in different places is dreadful and breaks up the family very sadly" (100), and, after two years of college, apparently at her mother’s insistence, she returned to Wilderstein. During the war, Daisy trained as a nurse and sought a posting overseas, but her parents forbade her from departing. Even as the children aspired to independence and "living their own lives," they spoke of Wilderstein as a place where one "cannot hope to remain" but to which they would like to return.

The tension between the desire to go out in the world and the desire to return to Wilderstein is evident even after Robert died and the Suckley family’s circumstances took a turn for the worse. Arthur moved to Monaco, where he built a villa with two apartments, one of which he lived in and one of which he rented out, yet he came back to Wilderstein later in life, playing tennis and drinking tea with his neighbors. Katharine traveled about in Europe and undertook a liaison with a married man, who turned out to be unwilling to divorce his wife, despite her apparent expectations. Later, she lived on the fringes of Greenwich Village and worked as a companion to wealthy ladies. She too returned to Rhinebeck, though she resided in a converted schoolhouse with a married couple and visited Wilderstein little. Betty, alone among the six children, did marry and have two daughters, but her husband managed their finances poorly, so that they were obliged to move into Wilderstein and receive support from their siblings. Daisy worked as a secretary to an aunt with houses in New York City and Mansakenning and, later, became the "closest companion" to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, yet she too returned home, where she would live until her death at a hundred years of age. If Wilderstein had never been able to fulfill its promise of a happy family life during the height of the Suckleys’ fortune, it was even less able to do so during these declining years. Bessie remained difficult through the end of her long life, and Robin, who remained at the estate throughout, managed the finances deplorably. When Franklin came to visit, the family would struggle to find chairs without broken bottoms for his entourage, and they would encourage him to sit in the one place where the view of the river was not overgrown. In her old age, Daisy planted a vegetable garden and became accustomed to fetching pans for the water when the roof leaked. Abandoned within seven years of its construction, Wilderstein has been in decrepitude for most of its history. Today, it is being restored as a historic site.

Wilderstein and the Suckleys is organized around Robert’s life, but it is Daisy who provides the book’s soul. For the first half of this work, Daisy stays in the background as we hear about her parents’ complex personalities and relationship, and, for most of the following pages, she functions only as one of their many children. Yet it is Daisy, Philip notes, who possessed the "great spirit" (127) that enabled her to accept the neglect of her parents, the interruptions in her schooling, the departure from her college, the death of her president and companion, and the loss of the familial fortune with grace, without becoming bitter or morose. While Robert may have built Wilderstein, it is Daisy who seems to have loved it more than anyone. In a letter to Franklin, she contrasts life in her aunt’s house, with its "strange wind," with life at Wilderstein, with the "intimacy" of its breeze (126). "Everything is strange, and perhaps for that reason interesting, in this little world" (126), she writes. The "strange" may be associated with what is interesting, what is perceived for the first time, what produces a heightened state of consciousness in its beholder, yet the "intimacy" of the old, familiar Wilderstein is not necessarily something to be forsaken on its account. For Daisy, as for her siblings, Wilderstein may have threatened to suffocate its inhabitants through its excess of maternal solicitude, but it also promised a safe, secure, and loving environment; it may have portended individual imprisonment in a household of often difficult characters, yet it also suggested family togetherness. Climbing up to the top story of Wilderstein’s high tower in her nineties, Daisy told a workman who was toiling there, "When I was a little girl, I asked my mother where I came from. She answered that I came in through a top tower window on a sunbeam. One of these days I shall go out on a moonbeam" (127). In these days when personal identity is understood as something fluid, defined by the self-realization the young person undertakes after his or her departure from house and family, instead of as something fixed, established by the house and family from which this young person derives, the impossibility of such an association of one’s birth and death, one’s origin and one’s end, indeed, the very trajectory of one’s life, with a piece of property is perhaps not entirely to be celebrated.

–Karen Sullivan