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

1. Dublin, Normandy, and St. Paul

1 DUBLIN, NORMANDY, AND ST. PAUL The Flandrau lineage that ends with this story is an exuberant parade of scholars, classicists, poets, soldiers, and lawyers from Ireland and France. Charlie learned noblesse oblige from exceptional parents. His mother, Rebecca — the love of his life — was slim, fragile , strikingly feminine, beguiling, a glass figurine of five feet four inches. She saw the world keenly, sensitively, with sky blue eyes. Her lithe body had a “delicate prettiness” that made her eternally girlish, even when she approached seventy and her curly hair, parted in the middle and pinned low at the back of her neck, had turned gray. “Her manner,” wrote Grace, “was of that total and exquisite naturalness and simplicity which a young and ignorant person might easily fail to recognize as part of a very complete sophistication. For all her intellectuality , she was above all a feeling person, intensely loyal, intensely biased where her affections lay.” Rebecca Blair McClure was born in 1839 in Butler, Pennsylvania, youngestofthreesisters.Herfather,William,wasadistinguishedlawyer and judge from Carlisle. When the demands of the bench became too much for him, he escaped with his pen to compose whimsical stories about trout fishing. Rebecca’s mother, Lydia Spenser Collins, was one of four daughters of a prominent Pennsylvania lawyer who came to the You see, it’s not much of a life to describe. There’s not much of what you would call incident in it. William Makepeace Thackery on Amelia Sedley, Vanity Fair colonies from Ireland as a boy in the late eighteenth century. The Collins of Dublin were staunch Protestants; cultivated in the fine arts; readers of Addison, Locke, and Richardson; versed in the harpsichord, stage, and opera. It was Lydia Collins’s grandfather, one in a long line of virulent anti-Catholics, who, a few months after losing a son in the Battle of the Nile in 1798, sailed with his wife, Susanna, Rebecca’s great-grandmother, for the British West Indies. What lured him to the outpost of Dominica was political patronage. He ruled, in all probability , over the windswept volcanic outcropping as governor. Susanna 18 D U B L I N , N O R M A N D Y , A N D S T. PAU L Flandrau’s mother, Rebecca Blair McClure Flandrau, 1870s. Author’s collection. Collins died there in his arms in 1800 and was buried on the island. One hundred thirty-five years later her great-great-grandson Charles Macomb Flandrau, months before his own death, was drawn to Dominica on an ill-fated pilgrimage to find her grave. In 1805 Susanna’s son Thomas, a successful Pennsylvania attorney , married the charming, refined Sarah Lowrey. She was the daughter of a Revolutionary War commissary, Colonel Stephen Lowrey, an Irish immigrant and one of the largest landowners in western Pennsylvania ’s Butler County. Thomas and Sarah Lowrey Collins built a country mansion on twenty acres along the Allegheny River near Pittsburgh . They had four daughters, including Rebecca’s mother, Lydia. Sarah was a grand dame of Pittsburgh society, entertaining Daniel Webster at a ball in Lafayette’s honor, summoning friends each Fourth of July to her estate for wine toasting. Rebecca Blair McClure was raised an independent thinker. She was educated in Pittsburgh’s private schools; read the Bible, Shakespeare , Milton, Addison, Steele, Fielding, and Sterne; and remembered “crying my eyes out” over Dickens’s David Copperfield. She spent hours wandering alone through oak, elm, and chestnut trees along Connoquenessing Creek near Butler, picking forget-me-not, dogwood, and wild plum blossoms from the hillside. She was atheist to the core. “There is but one hopeless word to my mind,” she wrote Charlie at Harvard in 1896, “and that is ‘eternity.’” Her first marriage, to John Wallace Riddle of Pittsburgh, ended with his death, leaving her with a young son, John. She returned to her mother in Butler in the heart of western Pennsylvania ’s nineteenth-century oil boom country. In 1870, at age thirtyone , she went west with six-year-old John to Minnesota, believing its winters could relieve her painful throat ailment. It was there she met one of the young state’s famous men, State Supreme Court Judge Charles Eugene Flandrau. He was a man of intelligence, wit, courage, dignified bearing, and, like Rebecca, a widower. In 1859 he had married his first cousin, Isabella Ramsey Dinsmore, at her family’s seven...