An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(30)
Allene was “the richest and saddest of New York’s socially celebrated widows,” wrote the New York Times, shortly after Anson’s death.
Years later Allene would attempt to cheer up someone in her social circle. “Everyone has sadness and much trouble and likes a gay pleasant friend about,” she wrote, followed in capital letters by “COURAGE ALL THE TIME.” But gay and pleasant company was not something the saddest widow of New York could offer in the spring of 1927. She was no good at being a victim or dealing with pitying looks, either. The only thing she had left was courage.
At the end of the winter, the staff of the Greta-Theo Holiday House was told they would no longer have to open the house in the summer. Its owner, the explanation went, was planning to leave the country and would no longer be capable of managing it, let alone turning up with a truckload of cabbage and chickens. A hasty petition from the “Greta-Theo Girls,” as Allene’s holidaymakers called themselves, ensured that the entire country house would later be given to a New York charitable organization that took over the running of the resort in its founder’s spirit.
On April 13, 1927, Allene set off. She traveled on the Cunard Line’s flagship, the RMS Mauretania, on which she’d made the ocean crossing to Europe with Anson many times. Now, aged fifty-four, she was traveling alone for the first time—away from the city where too many people knew too much about her past, away from the story itself, away, too, from the memories of almost everyone she could call family. And, as the Mauretania plowed steadily through the lead-gray waves of this still-chilly spring month, she dropped four years from her age and left her darker hair and her past in its wake.
So many had taken the same route from Europe to America, determined to make a new start—nose to the wind, gaze focused on what lay ahead of the prow of a giant ship. Many had changed and reinvented themselves in that strange limbo between here and there on an ocean journey, preparing themselves as best they could for life on the other side. Allene did the same, but in the opposite direction, an inverse emigrant.
There were echoes of the pioneers of Allene’s youth who had rebuilt, again and again, their burned-down settlement in the woods next to Lake Chautauqua and finally managed to erect an entire town. She had come from a family of strong men who had little time or patience for self-pity or weakness. What’s more, she was American. And if there was one thing that was truly American, it was the belief that it was always possible to start again.
Allene, thirty-six years old, now married to Morton Nichols, portrayed in the Society section of the New York Times, March 1909.
The Society section, New York Times, 1909.
Greta’s wedding gown in the New York Times, October 25, 1914.
Miss Greta Hostetter in her debutante photo in the Pittsburgh Gazette.
Article in the Lincoln Evening Journal, February 20, 1929.
8
The American Princess
About a year and a half later—it was a warm August day in 1928—a forty-nine-year-old German nobleman sent a letter from Castle Stonsdorf, in the Krkono?e mountain range in Silesia in southern Germany. His name was Henry Reuss, and he was a scion of an aristocratic German family that until 1918 had counted among the oldest and most prominent in Europe. Although there was no name at the top of the letter—the recipient had to make do with the polite “Gn?diges Fr?ulein” (“My dear Miss”)—its contents were intended for a governess. She had once taken care of him and his brothers and sister and now played an important role in the life of his children, who, since the death of Henry’s ex-wife five years earlier, had been left semiorphaned.
Henry had, he wrote, news that was to be kept strictly confidential. It was a matter of a “einem tief einschneidenden Ereignis”—a life-changing event for him, but also in terms of the lives of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Marlisa, and twelve-year-old son, Heiner:
I have got engaged and this to the widowed Mrs. Burchard, born Tew, from New York. She comes from a strict Protestant house which is held in high regard in America, is three years older than myself and has had three children, all of whom she has lost [. . .] My fiancée has no other close blood relatives and is alone in life. This is the reason that all of her very strong motherly love, her sensitive motherly understanding and feelings go out to my children. I know that she will become the person that both of my darlings miss without them realizing this. And I can already see how wonderfully their relationship is being built in the best harmony and with how much wise and deep understanding my fiancée attends to the two motherless children.
According to Henry, the American widow was also everything he looked for in a woman:
My fiancée is precisely that which I so ardently long for: a person tested by deep suffering and as a consequence, sincere, good-tempered, and though she is clement, decisive, energetic and purposeful—with a great and true feeling for art, wanting the best and seeking out the most beautiful. Naturally we are no infants and have found each other in a genuine, deep affection and our shared loneliness.
Both Henry’s children, as well as several family members, had been informed of the happy news by now.
I told the children the day before yesterday. At first they were a bit quiet and then they were happy in a very moving way and such warmth issued from their dear hearts. They spend a lot of time with my fiancée. They are becoming better acquainted all the time and hopefully growing fonder too. I am genuinely amazed by the amount of dependency and trust Marlisa has already developed for her; with Heiner things are becoming easier and simpler.