The Jews in America Trilogy (110 page)

“As far back as I can remember, I was filled with a passionate desire to go to college,” she wrote in her memoir. Her father took her on his knee and told her, sadly, that if she pursued this ambition she would never marry, because “Men hate intelligent wives.” Nevertheless, she enrolled in what Columbia College then called its “Collegiate Course for Women,” and, before she was twenty, was happily married to a successful doctor, Alfred Meyer. She found the “Collegiate Course” dismayingly restricted, however, devoted as it was largely to teaching women to roll hems and balance teacups, and she dropped out in 1886 without a degree, only to discover that the only other
institution of higher learning for women within a reasonable distance was the Harvard Annex (a forerunner of Radcliffe), but even that did not offer a degree. There was literally no college for women in New York City, nor anywhere nearby.

So Annie Nathan Meyer set out to start her own college. She set out, on her bicycle, to solicit funds and support from people all over the city who were either indifferent or unalterably opposed to women's colleges. She pedaled hundreds of miles up and down New York City streets, storming the fortresses of the rich and influential, demanding to be seen and listened to. Her friends and family—except her husband—immediately gave up on her, and decided that Annie and her crazy crusade were both hopeless. One of the women on whom she called was a Mrs. Wendell, the mother of a Harvard professor, who “actually wept”—so she said—“thinking of that sweet young girl wasting her
life
in the
impossible
attempt to found a woman's college connected with Columbia.”

And yet, little by little, she began to get support for her project. One of the earliest to back her was Ella Weed, headmistress of the then fashionable Miss Annie Brown's School on Fifth Avenue, where proper young ladies of New York society attended classes. Another enthusiastic supporter was Chauncey Depew, the wealthy clubman, and he was joined by such luminaries of the day as Richard Watson Gilder, the former editor of
Century
magazine, and Josephine Shaw Lowell. Suddenly it began to seem as though Annie Nathan Meyer on her bicycle really
was
going to start a college. Barnard College, named after a former president of Columbia (a tactic by which Annie Nathan got the support of Dr. Barnard's widow), received its charter in 1889, and its founder had wasted astonishingly little of her life in the effort. She was just twenty-two years old.

Though Barnard flourished and grew, it remained for
years New York's only women's college, and it took New York an uncommonly long time to realize what Barnard was and what New York had. In the 1890's, Mrs. William Astor—
the
Mrs. Astor of the famous ballroom—met her friend Mrs. Duer at a party and asked after Mrs. Duer's daughter, Alice, who later would become the poet Alice Duer Miller. “I haven't seen Alice at any of the dances all winter,” said Mrs. Astor. On being told that Alice was attending Barnard College, Mrs. Astor cried out, “What! That sweet young thing?” Several years later, a Barnard fund-raising group was speaking before a wealthy chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Because of the prominence of the women in the group, and the size of their pocketbooks, the Barnard ladies were certain that large contributions would be forthcoming. But, after several weeks had passed, and no gifts arrived, a call was paid on one of the Daughters. Had she been interested in Barnard's financial needs? she was asked. “Ah, yes,” the lady replied, “it was so interesting. I wish I could do something, but you see there is so much to do right here in New York. I can't give to anything so far away.”

Fund raising for Barnard continued to occupy much of Annie Nathan Meyer's life, and she lived to be nearly ninety. Obviously she was successful, for Barnard has grown from a handful of girls educated on a first-year budget of just over ten thousand dollars to an enrollment today of nearly two thousand women and an endowment in the tens of millions. Annie Meyer wrote:

A successful beggar must possess many conflicting qualities. She most possess a shrewd knowledge of human nature. And yet not too shrewd. It must be a shrewdness tempered and warmed by a magnificent confidence, a glorious awareness of the heights to which human nature may rise, as well as the depths to which it may fall. Obviously, the slightest tinge of cynicism plays havoc with the faith which is to move mountains. Never did I press the bell of a
millionaire's home with a finger that did not tremble. Never did I stand upon the top step before a millionaire's mansion without a fervent prayer that the one I had come to see would prove to be “not at home.”

Annie Nathan Meyer's only persistent failing was that she grew hysterical at funerals. When this happened, the wig she wore in later years would come flying off. Her husband would cry out, “Give her a thump! Give her a thump!” It all made Nathan family funerals something of an ordeal.

For all their separate successes, relations between the two Nathan sisters remained stormy. There were moments of good feeling between them, but those were few and of brief duration.

It seemed incongruous that these two small, compact, effective women—who happened to be sisters but who also had done so much for the common cause of women—should remain enemies, and yet they did. Toward the end of their lives, at a large reception for a welfare cause in which they both happened to be interested, the Nathan sisters showed up—separately, as usual. The two remained at the party for more than an hour before they left, separately. During the whole time, the founder of Barnard College and the great crusader for women's rights remained on opposite sides of the room, elaborately ignoring one another.

20

“FOUL DEEDS”

In 1928, one of the last attempts was made—publicly, at least—to have ancient Sephardic lineage stand for something: probity, dignity, authority. It involved, appropriately enough, the ancient family of de Fonseca-Brandon, and the American public was reminded—fleetingly—of the grandeur that this family could look back upon.

James de Fonseca-Brandon (1764–1843) of London was a shipping magnate of considerable proportions who owned several fleets of India merchantmen. His mansion in town contained so many “taxable lights” (a man's house was taxed according to how many windows it had) that it became something of an eighteenth-century landmark, and an
advertisement of its owner's great wealth. On the de Fonseca side of his hyphenated family, James de Fonseca-Brandon traced his descent directly back to the illustrious de Fonsecas of Madrid, one of whom, Cardinal de Fonseca (a
Converso,
obviously) was Grand Almoner to Ferdinand and Isabella at the time of Columbus' voyage.

The Brandon side of his genealogy was equally, if not more, illustrious. The Brandons were English, and included Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who had been consort to Mary, Queen of France, and related to various English monarchs, including Henry VIII, “Bloody” Mary, Elizabeth I, Edward VI, and Mary, Queen of Scots. James de Fonseca-Brandon married Sarah Mendes-da Costa, an heiress whose family fortune came from West Indian plantations; she traced herself back to the first Jewish settlers in the New World, who established a colony on the island of Curaçao. When Sarah Mendes-da Costa de Fonseca-Brandon died, the family pointed out proudly, if somewhat sorrowfully, she left her huge fortune—all of it—to “the poor of London of all denominations.”

One of
her
ancestors had, at one point, been considered the richest woman in England: Caterina Mendes-da Costa Villa-Real Mellish, called “the Belle of Bath” and celebrated in court circles as “Kitty” Mellish. Kitty Mellish was the mother of Elizabeth, Lady Galway, and a sister of Lady Suasso d'Auvergne Le Grand, and her father had been Antonio Mendes-da Costa, seventeenth-century governor of the Bank of England. Her mother, a cousin of her father's, Dona Caterina Mendes, had been the godchild of Queen Caterina of England, the childless consort of Charles the Second. This lady, Dona Caterina, had actually been born in Britain's royal palace, where her family lived with the prince and his consort; Dona Caterina's father, Don Fernando Mendes, a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, had been the most famous
surgeon of the seventeenth century, physician to three monarchs—King John IV of Portugal, Queen Caterina of England, and King Charles II of England. His portrait in court robes hangs—somewhat inappropriately, since he was a Marrano—in Westminster Abbey.

But by 1928 the de Fonseca-Brandon family—a number of whom had dropped the cumbersome Spanish part of the double name—despite the fact that it had become connected, in various ways, to the Hendricks family (a Brandon brother and sister married Hendricks counterparts), as well as to a number of Da Costa and de Fonseca cousins, had diminished to the point where the family consisted largely of a handful of spinster aunts and a young man named Lyman Brandon, who married and then divorced his wife, a New York lady lawyer who practiced under the name Frances Marion Brandon. It was she who put the Brandon name back under public scrutiny of a certain sort. In a lawsuit, Mrs. Brandon was claiming that she had been made the victim of a huge and nefarious swindle, one that involved not only herself but a number of her legal clients. This was what she claimed happened:

Mrs. Brandon, like some of her Nathan and Hendricks connections, had been an ardent feminist and, early in the twenties, she had been introduced to a Miss Annie Mathews, a Harlem dressmaker, who was running on a feminist platform for the office of New York county registrar. Mrs. Brandon gave liberal amounts of time and money to the Mathews campaign, which was successful, and in the process she became acquainted with one George J. Gillespie, a religious zealot who claimed to be a saint. Mrs. Brandon soon fell under Gillespie's charismatic spell, and before long Gillespie was a regular visitor at her house. The poor woman had just lost her mother, to whom she had been devoted. Thus she claimed that “While stricken in mourning, and completely under the influence of his
astounding ‘saintliness,' something I had never expected to find on earth, this rare bird-of-paradise by enslaving my mind, through his religious grip on me, and by his evil council, gradually got into entire control of my every thought and act, of my gilt-edged law practice, and, what is more to the point, of my amplitudious fees!”

For months on end, Mr. Gillespie and Mrs
.
Brandon had met at her house, where they chanted quotations from the Bible, sang hymns—he sang “Nearer My God to Thee” in a high soprano—and prayed. He brought along others of his flock, called “angels,” and she invited her friends—“Society folk,” as she described them—and mass conversions to the Gillespie sect took place. In the process, Mrs. Brandon and her friends were frequently called upon to contribute cash and gifts to Gillespie and his angels, as well as to Gillespie's wife, a “wretched paralytic,” who never presented herself. The Gillespians were so devoted to holiness and purity that they would not drink, smoke, swear, or even eat an egg “unless assured the hen that laid it was married.” Mr. Gillespie also claimed himself to be “one of Cardinal Hayes's personal attorneys,” representing himself to be “a religious man of deep piety, an exemplary Catholic living the life of a holy man of high principle, virtually a saint, withdrawn from the world and worldly interests and affairs.” Mrs. Brandon began to believe that Gillespie was her “second but superior self.”

Gillespie was particularly interested in one of Mrs. Brandon's clients, Miss Alice A. De Lamar, a maiden lady who had inherited a multimillion-dollar fortune from her father, Captain Raphael De Lamar, a mining magnate, whose estate Mrs. Brandon's law office managed. Presently, in his role as Frances Brandon's alter ego, Gillespie had a new “life plan” to offer her. He asked her, “What is your object in life?” And she answered, “To devote myself ultimately to the poor and helpless.” Solemnly he intoned,
“God sent me to you.”
What she needed, he said, was a seat on the children's court bench, where “Your great heart, great mind, irreproachable character, all are needed right there. There you must work as I do for the honor and glory of God. But first you must serve a brief apprenticeship doing court work for the city, to learn the ropes.” When Frances Brandon demurred, saying that she had a law practice to tend to, Gillespie said that was simply taken care of; he would take over her law practice and run it for her. Delighted, Frances Brandon agreed, and applied for the office of assistant corporation counsel for New York City, a post she was promptly given.

Not surprisingly, it wasn't too long before certain “irregularities” began to turn up in the accounts of some of the Brandon clients, particularly that of the biggest Brandon client, Alice De Lamar. Presently the irregularities seemed to amount to more than half a million dollars. When the new assistant corporation counsel attempted to get information from Gillespie, he put her off soothingly, assuring her that all was well. He, meanwhile, seemed to have made off with all her clients' files, records, and accounts, but Mrs. Brandon, still under his spell, could not believe that her “angel from Heaven” could be guilty of any wrongdoing. When her clients expressed anxiety, Mrs. Brandon attempted to put more pressure on her friend. She found him suddenly strangely hostile. In fact, when she suggested that she might have to go to higher authorities about the situation, the holy man threatened her life, saying—as she remembered it—“You're a squealer, are you? Well, one squeal and I'll have you bumped. I'll have you jobbed!”

The situation continued to worsen. After more than one meeting, over tea and sandwiches, at Gillespie's office, Frances Brandon got the distinct impression that Gillespie was trying to poison her. Some discreet research revealed that George Gillespie had been known elsewhere, and at
other times, by such names as Ginger-Ale George, Brother Gillespie, and Slippery George. He nonetheless continued to exercise “complete control and mastery” over her. And so, when he offered her a final and grotesque “deal,” she immediately accepted it. He said he would return her law practice to her if she would marry him. His “paralytic” wife, he explained, had conveniently died in the meantime.