An Uncommon Man: The Life and Times of Senator Claiborne Pell

Epilogue

296 Epilogue❒ TheShadeofaCopperBeech The sun was breaking through an overcast sky as Nuala Pell left her home and rode down Bellevue Avenue past her father-in-law’s former estate, now the headquarters of the Preservation Society of Newport County. A writer was at the wheel. It was Veterans Day, 2009. The car passed the Tennis Hall of Fame and First Beach and continued into Middletown. St. George’s School came into view as the car traveled past Hanging Rock, a massive outcropping of ledgerock in the woods below the school that has been a favorite destination for generations of young lovers. A memory brought a smile to Nuala’s face. In the summer of 1944, not long after they met, Claiborne took her on a date here, Nuala said. The writer suggested that perhaps the twenty-five-year-old suitor spoke about his alma mater. Nuala laughed. “He wasn’t talking about St. George’s,” she said. North on Indian Avenue the car continued, past Eastover, where Claiborne spent part of his childhood with his mother and stepfather. The car turned off at Saint Columba’s Chapel, a stone church built during the nineteenth century in old-English style. Ten months before, Pell’s worldly journey had ended here. His family had gathered around a freshly opened grave beneath a grand old copper beech tree as Episcopal Bishop Geralyn Wolf led them in the Lord’s Prayer. Coast Guardsmen fired a twenty-one-gun salute, a bugler played taps, and the American flag that draped the mahogany casket was folded and handed to Vice Admiral Clifford I. Pearson, Coast Guard chief of staff, whose father served with Pell on a cutter. Pearson gave the flag to Nuala. The casket was lowered, and Nuala and her family threw spades of earth on it. All was silent for a moment, and then the Pells disappeared inside black funeral-home limousines. Snow had frosted the cemetery grounds on that cold January day—but now it was covered with fallen leaves, a blanket of yellow and gold that reached up the chapel steps. Nuala pointed out her husband’s tombstone, recently erected. It was a simple gray tablet, like the stones marking the graves of Bertie and Julie, who lie next to their father. Inscribed on it were Pell’s name; dates of birth, death, and Senate service; and the epitaph he had written. e p i l o g u e ❒ 297 “Statesman, legislator, champion of education and the arts,” it read. Nuala walked through the churchyard, pointing out other graves she knew. There was Ollie O’Donnell, her father, who had found little time for Nuala and her brother after his divorce from their mother. There side-by-side were Claiborne’s mother, Matilda, who died in 1972 at Pelican Ledge, and Matilda’s husband, the mysterious Commander Koehler, whose death in 1941 had left Matilda in financial difficulty. There in front of the Koehlers was their only child together: Hugh Gladstone Koehler, who passed in 1990 at the age of 60. His premature death had moved stepbrother Pell to tears, one of the few times in his life that he cried. On the drive home, Nuala talked of Claiborne’s obsession with what lay after death. “He couldn’t accept the fact that there wasn’t anything,” she said. “I told him it was what you believed it to be—but you had to believe strongly that it would happen. But if you were doubtful, there was nothing.” Claiborne, Nuala said, went to his grave without ever revealing if he had reached any conclusion in his quest. No one would ever know if this man who had worked so long for peace had found it for himself. ...