In Gatsby's Shadow: The Story of Charles Macomb Flandrau

Epilogue: A House That Is Closed

EPILOGUE A HOUSE THAT IS CLOSED Thomas A. Boyd lived only a few turbulent years after he left St. Paul in the 1920s. After five more novels, a book of short stories, three biographies (including one Lewis Mumford praised as a “true contribution to American social history and a distinguished achievement”), a divorce from his novelist wife, Peggy, and a brief, unsuccessful career as a Hollywood screenwriter, he went east and ran unsuccessfully for governor of Vermont as a Communist. Perhaps war injuries hastened his physical decline; he died in New York City in January 1935 of a stroke at age thirty-seven. William Dundas Clark used his Flandrau inheritance to pursue his interest in tourism, whetted by his long-distance car trips with Charlie. He bought an interest in a motel near Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, then sold it to a nearby competitor for an offer that “almost made him rich.” A born entrepreneur with instinctive business acumen, Clark by turns owned a department store in Los Angeles , a malted milk shop and motel (graced with dozens of palm trees) in Indio, California, and a water company and pottery yard in Roswell, New Mexico. James Gray remembered Clark returned once to St. Paul “looking as sleek as an Arizona Senator in a beautifully tailored suit and a shimmering grey Fedora.” Clark and his wife lived in southern California then settled in Roswell, where she died in 1960, he in 1979. Herbert Copeland and F. Holland Day, the young Boston publishers who brought out Flandrau’s Harvard Episodes in 1897, went out of business eighteen months later. Copeland descended into alcoholism and debt, often evicted from his lodgings, becoming desperate for work. His finest work may have been as editor in 1899 of Booker T. Washington’s The Future of the American Negro. He dabbled in publishing at several magazines but seemed to have lost interest in his craft and in life itself. One observer remembered him at the Saturday Evening Post in the 1910s as “a changed man, devoid of ambition, careless of dress.” When he died November 24, 1923, he was an employee of the Boston City Hospital. Day lost interest in the business , distracted by his new love: artistic photography. In 1904 a fire destroyed his Boston studio and perhaps as many as two thousand glass negatives. He built a chalet in Maine where he spent his summers and cared for his mother at the family home in Norwood, Massachusetts . He became ill in 1919, was bedridden in the mid ’20s, but managed to entertain visitors and maintain a broad correspondence . He tended toward hypochondria; his doctor (unprofessionally) described him as being in virtual hibernation, “swathed in blankets pinned with meticulous care about his wrists . . . surrounded by ingenious gadgets and moveable bedside bookshelves. . . . His great exertion of the day was a trip to the bathroom.” He died of prostate cancer November 2, 1933. F. Scott Fitzgerald, age forty-four and looking twenty years older, died December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, California, eighteen years after he left St. Paul for the last time. He recalled St. Paul in a letter to his friends the Kalmans in the 1930s as a “tough and usually impolite ” city, but “a part of me will always live” there. “Still home” he called it, though “I never want to spend another winter there.” Years later 599 Summit was quietly designated a national historic landmark. Then, near the end of the century, humorist Garrison Keillor, a Minnesota native, led a campaign to rename the old Shubert Theater at Exchange and Wabasha, one of the venues Scott and Charlie frequented , the Fitzgerald Theater. In 1996, on the hundredth anniversary of Fitzgerald’s birth, a life-size bronze statue of Fitzgerald by sculptor Michael B. Price was unveiled in St. Paul’s Rice Park, just across the street from where once stood the old Orpheum. Blair Flandrau died the evening of November 27, 1938, at age sixty-two in St. Paul of a cerebral hemorrhage, suffering for years from hypertension and arteriosclerosis. His remains were buried in the family plot at Oakland Cemetery. Grace Hodgson Flandrau never wrote another novel after the deaths of the Flandrau brothers in 1938. She lived in Farmington, Connecticut, near Theodate and John Riddle and in Tucson, Arizona, near Martha Breasted and Jack Greenway, descendents of Martha “Patty” Flandrau Selmes. Plagued by depression and indecision, she 216 E P I L O G U E [18.119.126.80] Project...