The Last Castle 1 A Winter''s Tale That was the year she started spending her winters in New York again. Edith Dresser was fifteen years old when her grandmother, Susan Elizabeth Fish LeRoy, decided that she and the Dresser children would leave their Rhode Island home for the Christmas season. The year was 1888. Seasonal migrations from Newport to New York were common among their privileged set, and the allure of the great city on the Hudson still drew their grandmother into its predictably casted embrace. Grandmother was a woman at ease in the world of drawing rooms and calling cards, one who appreciated both the ritualistic behaviors and increased social diversions that New York could be counted on to provide. "New Amsterdam"--as Manhattan had once been known--had been home to their family''s Dutch ancestors. Now Grandmother, in turn, had become all that constituted home and family to Edith, her three sisters, and brother. Grandmother had arranged to rent a house at 2 Gramercy Square, a very respectable--if not ultra-fashionable--address for the family.

Its next-door twin, 1 Gramercy, had been the last home of the noted surgeon and professor Dr. Valentine Mott. Mott had helped establish the short-lived Rutgers Medical College in lower Manhattan, and gained attention as the chair of surgery at both the University Medical College of NYU and Columbia''s College of Physicians and Surgeons. More salaciously, he earned some notoriety as a disruptor of all that was good and pure in the world of medical instruction when he promoted the idea of using human cadavers to instruct up-and-coming clinicians. His good works and surgical brilliance kept his reputation intact, even though the good doctor was known to have disguised himself as a laborer and visited graveyards to retrieve recently unearthed teaching aids. Around the corner on the south side of Gramercy Square, at No. 16, was the brand-new Players Club, which was opening that winter. The building had been purchased by the actor Edwin Booth, who could currently be seen as Brutus in a production of Julius Caesar.

Twenty-three years earlier, Booth had announced his retirement following his deranged brother John Wilkes Booth''s assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Distraught over his brother''s actions, Edwin penned an open letter to "the People of the United States," which was published in several newspapers: "For the future alas," he wrote. "I shall struggle on in my retirement bearing a heavy heart, an oppressed memory and a wounded name--dreadful burdens--to my too welcome grave." However, he curtailed his retirement to a nine-month hiatus from the limelight, returning to the stage--and welcome audiences--in 1866 as Hamlet, a role he continued to reprise. The newly founded Players Club would house an impressive library of theater history, as well as collections of paintings and autographs. Booth wrote a friend that he wanted the club to "be a place where actors are away from the glamour of the theatre," and that thespians should spend more time mingling with minds that "influence the world." To that end, founding members of the club included author Mark Twain and the celebrated Union Army general William Tecumseh Sherman. 2 Gramercy Square, where young Edith and her family would be staying, was the home of the Pinchot family--businessman James Wallace Pinchot; his wife, Mary Jane Eno Pinchot; and their children, Gifford, Amos, and Antoinette.

The Pinchot family had recently completed the building of a new Milford, Pennsylvania, home that had been designed by the noted New York City architect Richard Morris Hunt and subsequently dubbed "Grey Towers." The Pinchots'' oldest son, Gifford, was away studying at Yale, and Edith and her sisters knew "Nettie" Pinchot from dancing class in Newport. The four-story brick house was Italianate in style, with cast-iron railings gracing its small balconies and floor-to-ceiling parlor windows. Edith''s brother, Daniel--who went by his middle name "LeRoy"--was in his final year at Columbia, which meant that he would again be living under the same roof as his sisters. Susan, the oldest, was now twenty-four, and two years older than LeRoy. Natalie was nineteen and Pauline, the baby, was still just twelve. The family would be together, nestled in this house across from the gated park. From outside those parlor windows looking in, one might have seen four young ladies and one young man living the kind of gleaming nineteenth-century life envied by scores of less fortunate citizens of the time.

A closer inspection of their lives, however, revealed signs of difficulty and strain, like scuff marks hidden beneath the smooth veneer of a freshly polished parlor floor. They were five siblings, separated in age by twelve years; joined, as so many other families of the time were, by tragic loss. * * * Edith''s parents had met at West Point, New York, where her father was a cadet and her mother, Susan Fish LeRoy, was staying nearby with her family at the Rose Hotel. After George Warren Dresser graduated from the United States Military Academy and posted at Fort Adams outside Susan''s home of Newport, he pursued his love. It was not an easy road. The Fish-LeRoy family was exceptionally well known in New York circles where names carried the weight of history and bore the shackles of expected romantic pairings. First, middle, last, and family names were shuffled around from generation to generation--perpetually recombining DNA of societal rank--so that they would always be a part of one''s title, ensuring that even the smallest link to storied heritage was immediately evident upon one''s first introduction. Fish .

LeRoy . King . Schermerhorn . Stuyvesant. Edith''s mother had bestowed upon Edith a middle name taken from the surname of their ancestor, the famed Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant. It would serve Edith in future times when money could not. Edith''s father was a congenial, accomplished, and educated man with an honorable if humbler background than that of her mother. George Warren Dresser was of New England stock, educated at Andover, and hailing from a line of teachers, farmers, and lawyers.

Edith''s grandfather Daniel LeRoy did not consider him an appropriate match for Edith''s mother and objected vocally and often to George and Susan''s union. But her mother''s older sister, Aunty Mary King--who herself had made a predictably wealthy yet loveless match--stood firmly on the Dresser side of love. Aunty King welcomed George into her home in Newport, where he was free to call on her sister. Hearts won out. In April 1863 at Calvary Church in New York, a line of groomsmen in uniform stood proudly by as George Warren Dresser married Susan Fish LeRoy. Then George headed south to war along with classmates, volunteers, and countless immigrants just arrived from places like Ireland and Germany. George rose from a second lieutenancy in the Fourth Artillery to major before the war ended. Along the way he fought in the Battle of Bull Run and commanded a company out of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he played a vital part in securing federal supply lines against Confederate attack.

Once the war ended, George''s accolades mattered little to Edith''s grandfather, who insisted his son-in-law resign from the military and give his daughter the opportunity to live a life more worthy of her bloodline. George consented and began a career in civil engineering. He made friends easily, and acted as editor of the trade publication American Gas Light Journal. He had bright dark eyes, a barrel physique, and wore his hair parted down the middle with just the suggestion of a wave on each side. The lower half of his face was wreathed in the friendly muttonchops popularized by Civil War general Ambrose Burnside. George welcomed all into his home--the children of friends, army comrades, gas workers. Edith''s mother was more soft-spoken, attentive to her children, skilled with a needle and thread, and purposely eschewed much of the life laid out for her. She loved her George dearly.

Of any residences in New York or Newport, the one perhaps most deeply etched in the minds of the Dresser children was the house at 35 University Place. The salon on the front of the three-story home provided young Edith and her sisters a view through a French window of Manhattan life outside. Sitting among the brocade surroundings they watched the horse-drawn streetcars passing by. The sisters competed to see who could most quickly identify the car numbers as the vehicles made their way north in the direction of Times Square, hauled by a few of the hundreds of thousands of horses that powered the city''s transportation, baptizing its streets with their urine and fertilizing whatever weeds managed to sprout between pavers with their manure. In the back of the house, a glass conservatory overlooked the yard. From this vantage point, young Edith, all gangly legs and long, bone-straight hair, could keep an eye on her nineteen turtles. She watched as they basked happily within their shells in a warm spot, dove deep under the soil and brush to hibernate for the winter, and erupted from the earth for another season in the sun. Edith shared a room on the second floor with her two older sisters.

It had one row of beds with a small conservatory outside that normally remained empty, save for the time Edith was quarantined there during a whooping cough episode. The servants'' quarters were in the basement, where the children found an excellent roller-skating surface and there was always a soft perch fo.