The tessellated entrance floor took the Italian workers eight months to complete, but it is worth the effort, the green and sienna and palest ecru of the tiles forming a rich yet unobtrusive foretaste of the splendors within. Your correspondent peeped into Mr. Drummond’s study, a most masculine sanctum, redolent of leather, with deep red curtains drawn across the mullioned windows so that the great man isn’t tempted by the beauties of nature to abandon his important tasks.
Of course, the greatest beauty of all is within. Mrs. Matthew Drummond, nee Miss Laura Taverner, was the cynosure of all eyes when she appeared in her embroidered tulle over pale cornflower satin, the gold chiffon tunic edged with rhinestones (from Worth’s own hands, my dears, as Mrs. Drummond’s maid whispered, arrived last week from Paris), with a display of ostrich plumes and diamonds that were the envy of every other lady. Mrs. Michael Taverner, Mrs. Drummond’s sister-in-law, seemed almost to faint with misery when she saw how commonplace her rose charmeuse appeared. Of course, Mrs. Edwards Bayard has a mind above dress, as everyone who has seen that mauve bombazine a thousand times or so could testify-or perhaps her husband’s extra-domestic activities are funded from her clothes budget!
The coy correspondent recounted with a wealth of description the thirteen bedrooms, the billiard room, the music room where Mrs. Drummond’s spectacular performance on the piano held dinner guests spellbound, the ornamental pool lined with blue clay and the three motorcars which Mr. Drummond had installed in the new “garage, as we hear the English are calling the structure for housing these modern conveyances.”
How very modern of old Matthew Drummond. The garage, which loomed to my right, could hold six modern motorcars with room for a machine shop to repair them. Then, as now, vast wealth needed flaunting. How else did others know you had it?
After reading about Larchmont’s wonders, I’d searched various indices, looking for news of Geraldine. I wanted actually to see who Darraugh’s father had been, or what had happened to engender the contempt in Geraldine’s voice when she mentioned him. It was more than idle curiosity: I wanted to know what currents lay beneath my client’s surface so I could avoid falling in them and getting swept away.
I found Geraldine’s birth in 1912-a “happy event,” as the language of a century ago put it, a baby sister to keep little Stuart Drummond company. The next report was of her coming-out party in 1929 with other girls from the Vina Fields Academy. Her Poiret tulle gown was described in detail, including the diamond chips bordering the front drapery. Apparently the crash in the market hadn’t kept the family from pulling out all the stops. After all, some people did make money from the disaster-maybe Matthew Drummond had been among them.
The next family news was a clip welcoming Geraldine home from Switzerland in the spring of 1931, this time in a white Balenciaga suit, “looking interestingly thin after her recent illness.” I raised my brows at
this: was it TB, or had Laura Taverner Drummond hustled her daughter to Europe to deal with an unwelcome pregnancy?
There’d been a major depression on in the thirties, but you wouldn’t know that from the society pages. Descriptions of gowns costing five or even ten thousand dollars dotted the gossip columns. Money like that would have supported my father’s family in comfort for a year. He’d been nine in 1931, delivering coal in the mornings before school to help the family eke out a living after his father got laid off. I’d never met my grandfather, whose health deteriorated under the strain of not being able to support his family. He’d died in 1946, right after my parents were married.
No considerations like that marred Geraldine Drummond’s 1940 wedding to MacKenzie Graham. The ceremony was a no-holds-barred affair at Fourth Presbyterian Church on North Michigan Avenue-eight attendants, two young ring bearers, followed by a reception at the Larchmont estate so lavish that I was surpised the mansion hadn’t collapsed from the weight of the caviar. The happy couple left for two months in South America-the European war precluded a French destination.
Reading between the lines, it sounded as though Geraldine had been forcefed to the son of some business crony of her father’s. Her one brother, Stuart, had died in a car wreck without leaving any children, so Geraldine was presumably the heir to all the Drummond enterprises. Maybe Matthew and Laura Drummond chose a son-in-law they thought could manage the family holdings. Or maybe Laura had chosen someone she could control herself-in the wedding photos, the bridegroom looked hunted and unhappy.
MacKenzie Graham stayed at Larchmont Hall until his death in 1957. Tidy obituaries in all the papers, death at home of natural causes. Which could mean anything from cancer to bleeding to death from a shooting accident. Maybe that was what had turned Darraugh against Larchmont, seeing his father die here.