Read Online The Family by Kitty Kelley - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Kitty Kelley
Tags: Fiction
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most—Kennebunkport, Maine. So she and her mother began planning for the following August. The ceremoney was to be held in St. Ann’s Episcopal Church and the reception at Surf Ledge, the Walkers’ summer home atop the rugged cliffs of the Atlantic Ocean.
Dorothy’s seven bridesmaids, including her sister, Nancy, as maid of honor (“First Maid again, eh?”), came from the Social Register world, as did most of Prescott’s ten groomsmen, six of whom were Skull and Bones men, including his brother, Jim. Dotty tried to match the wedding party by height so that Isabel Rockefeller would not tower over Henry Sage Fenimore Cooper, and Prescott, at six feet four, wouldn’t look like Mr. Snow White surrounded by seven dwarfs.
Loulie Wear Walker did most of the work on her daughter’s wedding and was properly saluted by the
New York Journal American
, which described the affair as “brilliant and as perfect in details as the good taste of Mrs. G. Herbert Walker could make it.”
Dorothy ecstatically told friends that she had found her prince and was looking forward to a life of happily-ever-after. She was not to be disappointed. As she wrote in a tribute many years later for Prescott’s funeral, “When he stood at the altar 51 years ago and promised to ‘Keep thee only unto her as long as you both shall live,’ he was making a pledge to God that he never for one moment forgot, and gave his wife the most joyous life that any woman could experience.”
Things could not have been happier for the young couple during their engagement. But tragedy soon interrupted their bliss. The phone rang on Saturday evening, September 4, 1920, and Prescott learned that his sparkling forty-eight-year-old mother had been tragically killed. Flora and her husband of twenty-six years were at Watch Hill, Rhode Island, with their youngest child, Jim, who was looking forward to soon being his brother’s best man. Flora and Sam were belatedly celebrating their twenty-sixth wedding anniversary at Ocean House, where they had been, according to the society pages, “prominent guests for a number of summers.” They had decided to take a walk along Watch Hill Road in the late afternoon. Friends passed them in a car and backed up to talk by the side of the road. Another car coming down the hill swerved quickly to avoid an accident. At that very moment, Samuel Bush left his position beside his friend’s car and was followed by Flora. The driver coming down the hill slammed on his brakes but could not stop in time. Flora was killed instantly.
In her letters to her husband during the summer of 1908, Flora’s reflections on the fragility of life coupled with her enthusiasm for the automobile read poignantly next to the newspaper reports of her terrible death.
The Bushes gathered sadly in Columbus, Ohio, to bury Flora a few days after the accident. They felt star-crossed by funerals and had been gathering too frequently in the last two years to bury loved ones—first Flora’s father, then her sister, and now, heartbreakingly, Flora herself.
The following summer, on August 6, 1921, the Bushes and the Walkers all gathered in Kennebunkport for the wedding everyone had looked forward to with such joyous anticipation. The bride was beautiful, the groom handsome, and, despite Prohibition, the champagne flowed. Samuel Bush, looking more pensive than usual, felt lonely without his ebullient wife by his side. How happy Flora would have been to see their “splendid boy” marry into high society. Prescott was now well and truly poised to take the family name into history.
CHAPTER THREE
A down-at-the-heels banker in a po’boy cap stands on the sidewalk in the middle of morning rush hour and tries to hawk apples. A distinguished man in a black bowler strolls by and waves his walking stick.
“Well, so long,” says the apple seller. “I’ll see you at lunch at the Bankers Club.”
The trenchant
New Yorker
cartoon captured the financial tumult of the
Dorothy’s seven bridesmaids, including her sister, Nancy, as maid of honor (“First Maid again, eh?”), came from the Social Register world, as did most of Prescott’s ten groomsmen, six of whom were Skull and Bones men, including his brother, Jim. Dotty tried to match the wedding party by height so that Isabel Rockefeller would not tower over Henry Sage Fenimore Cooper, and Prescott, at six feet four, wouldn’t look like Mr. Snow White surrounded by seven dwarfs.
Loulie Wear Walker did most of the work on her daughter’s wedding and was properly saluted by the
New York Journal American
, which described the affair as “brilliant and as perfect in details as the good taste of Mrs. G. Herbert Walker could make it.”
Dorothy ecstatically told friends that she had found her prince and was looking forward to a life of happily-ever-after. She was not to be disappointed. As she wrote in a tribute many years later for Prescott’s funeral, “When he stood at the altar 51 years ago and promised to ‘Keep thee only unto her as long as you both shall live,’ he was making a pledge to God that he never for one moment forgot, and gave his wife the most joyous life that any woman could experience.”
Things could not have been happier for the young couple during their engagement. But tragedy soon interrupted their bliss. The phone rang on Saturday evening, September 4, 1920, and Prescott learned that his sparkling forty-eight-year-old mother had been tragically killed. Flora and her husband of twenty-six years were at Watch Hill, Rhode Island, with their youngest child, Jim, who was looking forward to soon being his brother’s best man. Flora and Sam were belatedly celebrating their twenty-sixth wedding anniversary at Ocean House, where they had been, according to the society pages, “prominent guests for a number of summers.” They had decided to take a walk along Watch Hill Road in the late afternoon. Friends passed them in a car and backed up to talk by the side of the road. Another car coming down the hill swerved quickly to avoid an accident. At that very moment, Samuel Bush left his position beside his friend’s car and was followed by Flora. The driver coming down the hill slammed on his brakes but could not stop in time. Flora was killed instantly.
In her letters to her husband during the summer of 1908, Flora’s reflections on the fragility of life coupled with her enthusiasm for the automobile read poignantly next to the newspaper reports of her terrible death.
The Bushes gathered sadly in Columbus, Ohio, to bury Flora a few days after the accident. They felt star-crossed by funerals and had been gathering too frequently in the last two years to bury loved ones—first Flora’s father, then her sister, and now, heartbreakingly, Flora herself.
The following summer, on August 6, 1921, the Bushes and the Walkers all gathered in Kennebunkport for the wedding everyone had looked forward to with such joyous anticipation. The bride was beautiful, the groom handsome, and, despite Prohibition, the champagne flowed. Samuel Bush, looking more pensive than usual, felt lonely without his ebullient wife by his side. How happy Flora would have been to see their “splendid boy” marry into high society. Prescott was now well and truly poised to take the family name into history.
CHAPTER THREE
A down-at-the-heels banker in a po’boy cap stands on the sidewalk in the middle of morning rush hour and tries to hawk apples. A distinguished man in a black bowler strolls by and waves his walking stick.
“Well, so long,” says the apple seller. “I’ll see you at lunch at the Bankers Club.”
The trenchant
New Yorker
cartoon captured the financial tumult of the
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