The Fall of the House of Walworth: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America - Hardcover

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Geoffrey O'Brien is a poet, editor, and cultural historian. He is editor in chief for the Library of America. His other nonfiction books include Hardboiled America, Dreamtime, The Times Square Story, Red Sky Café, and Sonata for Jukebox. He lives in New York City.

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1

A Haunted House

There was a woman who lived alone in a house with fifty- five rooms. It was dark in the house. She kept the curtains drawn by day, and most of the rooms she never entered after nightfall.

The house stood at the north end of Broadway, the celebrated main thoroughfare of the city of Saratoga Springs, New York. It was built in 1815 and acquired the name Pine Grove from the stand of pines that loomed over it. Back then its site was an outlying corner of a village just beginning to grow into a national showcase. The house grew larger along with the village. By the time Clara Grant Walworth was born in 1886, it had expanded extravagantly beyond its original dimensions and went by the name of the Walworth Mansion.

In 1952, as Clara contemplated the end of her days, the house was very much in the center, but of what? Saratoga Springs was a place she now found hard to recognize. The house was different too from what it had been in the time of her ancestor Chancellor Walworth. The protective pines were long gone, most of them cut down before her birth, the surrounding grounds sold off, and the original compact Walworth home obscured (as it changed from residence to court house to boarding school to hotel, reverting finally to residential seclusion) within the annexes and additional stories built around and on top of it.

The original one- and- a-half- story dwelling had been buried within the creaking hulk of a Victorian warren of tiny bedrooms and airless corridors. Within that warren Clara had spent her first months, her summers, and her holidays. Since turning fifty she had hardly left the place.

Outside, in the Saratoga Springs of the early 1950s, the old hotels— those still standing— were falling into decay. The decline had been steady for as long as Clara could remember. The symptoms were by now unmistakable. The splendors of Saratoga Springs were reduced to parking lots and orange- juice stands and neon- lit taverns, thronged with a new generation of tourists who knew nothing of the history that had taken shape here. At night cheap gamblers padded in bathrobes through the dark and narrow hallways of the once luxurious Grand Union Hotel.

The corruption of Saratoga was nowadays a national scandal. Local politicians and racket bosses submitted to federal investigation. The hearings were on television, so the whole world could see how thoroughly the town had been bought up, decades ago, by the likes of Arnold Rothstein and Joe Adonis and Meyer Lansky, gangsters in whose gaudy "lake houses" anything could happen. The townspeople had been happy to take the money and look the other way.

One way or another, this had been going on for years. You might say it had been going on ever since John Morrissey, a low- life Irish boxer from the back streets of Troy, had started up his gambling business during the Civil War. But the ruffians and vulgarians of Clara's parents' and grandparents' time began in retrospect to assume an air of respectability— even dignity— compared with the rot that had set in since. Morrissey, after all, had at least kept the locals out of his establishment, and shut down the gambling tables on Sundays.

She had lived to witness the final degradation of what had been not just beautiful but noble. The Saratoga Springs of racetracks and gambling dens was not the town Clara thought of as hers. Her Saratoga was an older, more rarefied place steeped in the memory of Revolutionary War heroes, inspired religious teachers, and women who had dedicated themselves for generations to preserving an America that seemed always on the verge of disappearing into some brutal caricature of itself. Her great- grandmother had been part of the effort to preserve George Washington's home at Mount Vernon; her grandmother had seen to it that the battlefield of Saratoga, where the tide of war had turned against the British, would endure as a historical monument; her mother had renovated this very house.

Why hadn't anyone stopped America from becoming a nation run by crooks? Not that there were not plenty of crooks in the old days, but forces also existed that were capable of holding them in check, forces as much spiritual as physical. There were things you didn't do, affronts that were unimaginable. Now it had all become a sort of affront. If she no longer enjoyed leaving the house, it was because some new shock always waited for her. One more thing had been destroyed or cheapened.

She preferred to stay indoors to savor what was preserved within the walls, even if most of it was invisible. Clara had been born in this house and, at sixty- five, could expect to die here. Her world was by now largely restricted to the innermost core, the Chancellor's original domain. It was a space thick with ghosts. She traced their movements by recollecting every story she had ever been told, every anecdote tied to the pictures and objects and pieces of old furniture for which the house had become a repository. By making sure that everything stayed in its place— by remaining faithful to what her mother and grandmother had taught her— she kept the ancestors near at hand. For years she had repeated the stories to any visitor who would listen. Now that visitors were rare, she told them to herself, taking care not to omit a single detail.

Her role, all her life, had been to preserve and remember. A votary in an abandoned temple, she had been born to go through every scrap of paper, rummage in every drawer, make lists of relics left behind. The house was her museum; her mausoleum, finally. She had been buried here, together with all she loved, for as long as she could remember.

She thought ceaselessly about everything that had happened in these rooms. Might it have been on this spot that Daniel Webster stood as he argued a case? Or in this corner that Andrew Jackson had exploded into wrath against the southern nullifiers, in the middle of a game of whist? James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving and the magnificent poet Mrs. Sigourney had sat at the dinner table. Presidents, senators, military commanders, the most distinguished authors, and the most celebrated preachers of the gospel, all had trooped through, in the time of heroes and founders when the world was fresh.

Here was the north parlor where the man those people came to see— her great- grandfather, New York's state chancellor Reuben Hyde Walworth— held court for decades. Now it had become her sickroom.

She had come to the end, not just of her own life, but of everything to which those earlier lives had been dedicated.

There had been a family and there had been a nation. To her they had almost been the same thing. She carried the blood of the Mayflower pilgrims in her. Davy Crockett was somewhere in the family tree. Her mother's father had been a friend of President Lincoln, her paternal great- grandmother a cousin of Mary Todd. Her great- uncle had left his right arm on a battlefield in Virginia. Her grandmother had danced at President Grant's inauguration. On both sides of the family her people had warded off invading armies and established the laws of the new land. They had been among those who counted for something in the making of the country. Now that the family had almost reached, in her, its point of extinction, might not the country as well be close to its terminus?

And where had the family gone? How could a family vanish?

In the memory parade of ancestors— the settlers and warriors and justices and evangelists— something was missing. There was an episode never to be part of any inscription or memorial address. It lived in unlit corners. At times it made her feel she had really not been born, as if this half- life were a shadow cast by a disaster before her birth.

Her life had been,...