Yasnaya Polyana, New Jersey

I think of the Perkins as a raft of Boston culture, - one of those rafts that were to be found in many another American town, serenely riding the wild waters of the world around them . . . Now the Perkins were not only New Englanders, they were even doubly so, for they united the two great lines of Boston and New Haven, - Harvard and Yale, - the twin immemorial schools of the mind of New England. Max, descended on one side from the old East India magnates, - some of whom had been Loyalists in the Revolution in Boston,- was, on the other, through his grandfather Evarts, the Senator and Secretary of State, descended from John Davenport and Roger Sherman. I mention this merely because I have known few other Americans in whom so much history was palpably and visibly embodied, so that one saw it working in him, sometimes not too happily, for his mind was always in a state of civil war.

- Van Wyck Brooks

In his “hyperaesthetic youth”, Van Wyck Brooks was mortified to have been born in the dully named town of Plainfield, New Jersey. As he grew older however, he was greatly relieved to find out that Tolstoy’s place Yasnaya Polyana, where he wrote War and Peace, meant the same thing in Russian, and he eventually discovered that Plainfield in the 1880’s, had more mystery, intrigue, and personality than most simple unadorned American towns. By the time the new train station was built in 1885, Plainfield was growing into one of the affluent suburbs made possible by the railroad link to New York. With its relatively pure air, the local paper touted Plainfield as the “Colorado of the East” and a haven for sufferers of respiratory illnesses, even though it boasted no exalted Rocky Mountains. The “Town of a Hundred Millionaires” filled up with capitalists and robber barons, as well as some literary folk such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian, Julia Ward Howe’s daughter Florence, and Bret Harte’s abandoned wife and daughter. Edward and Betty Perkins moved out from Manhattan to Plainfield after the first three boys, Ned, Max, and Carley, were born. They bought a nice comfortable house on Central Avenue, and Edward, who never wore an overcoat, bought the first high wheel bicycle in town and rode it to the train station each morning to commute to his law practice at Gray & Davenport in the city. Three more children followed, Molly (1890) and Fanny (1892), and finally Louis (1896), and Edward and Betty quickly became close friends with other young parents in town, including Rowland and Fanny Cox and Charles and Sallie Brooks. The Perkins threw themselves into their new community. They were active in St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, and helped found the “Shakespeare Club of Plainfield” where they read Shakespeare aloud with their neighbors (the first reading selection came from King Lear). They made sure not to miss a week, because the club had the habit of electing as president a member who was absent from the meeting. Betty and Sallie Brooks and Fanny Cox joined The Monday Afternoon Club which provided a literary outlet for women (Betty explicated Matthew Arnold's Dramatic Poetry, while Sallie addressed the club on Roman, Byzantine, Arabian, Turkish, and Moorish Ornament). Edward, whose father had been on the School Board in Boston, ran for School Trustee as a Democrat, and on Sunday nights at home, he read aloud to his children from Ivanhoe, The Rose and the Ring, and the Three Musketeers. “I have watched my own career since 1885 with friendly interest, but I hardly think a particular account of it is anxiously desired by my friends and classmates, though I hope many of them will be glad to know that I have been fairly prosperous and successful." When Mr. Gray was appointed to the Court of Appeals, the firm became Davenport, Smith & Perkins, then Smith & Perkins, and then Perkins & Jackson. Edward worked hard, and his practice was successful. One of his important cases was Goetze vs. United States in which it was decided by the Supreme Court that Puerto Rico ceased, after the treaty with Spain, to be a "foreign country" within the meaning of the tariff laws. His personal style reflected his New England training and ancestry and made him a valuable member of the grievance committee of the New York Bar Association. They often travelled into Manhattan to visit Betty’s parents and their city friends. Society in New York had moved uptown and the slums had moved in around the old downtown neighborhood, but the Evarts still lived in the old house at 231 2nd Avenue. Plainfield society came into the city when Uncle Charles Bruen Perkins finally, in 1896, got married to Elizabeth Ward, a tall and sweet looking brunette. Monsignor Doane conducted the ceremony, and the New York Times took note: "a fashionable wedding in an old-fashioned New York house early in September is so decidedly a novelty". Grandfather Evarts, the Senator, was getting old and blind. In 1889 he had sailed to Europe on “La Champagne” with his son Allen and his daughter Mary to consult the best oculists in Europe. By the mid nineties, he began to find it hard to travel. The grandchildren, however, were full of life. Ned and Max Perkins made life-long friends with Ames and Van Wyck Brooks. Ned and Max were sent off to St. Paul’s when they turned thirteen. Ned entered the School in 1896, where he was an Isthmian who played on the second eleven, an assistant editor of the Horae Scholasticae Magazine and a member of the Concordian Literary Society, the Missionary Society, and the Library Association. Max, who shared his literary inclinations, followed him in 1898 and became quarterback and captain of the third Isthmian Football Team. Grandfather Evarts became increasinngly housebound in New York. Joseph Choate came to call just before embarking for England where he had been appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Evarts congratulated him and prophesied a brilliant diplomatic career, but then shook his head and said, "When I think what a care I am to my people, lying so helpless here, and that I can do nothing any more to repay their kindness, or to help in the world, I feel like the boy who wrote home from school to his mother a letter of twenty pages, and then added: 'P.S. Mother, please excuse my longevity.' " The former Senator and Secretary of State, who had moved the unanimous nomination of Lincoln, defended Johnson against impeachment, and secured Hayes disputed election, turned eighty-three on February 6th, 1901. Two weeks later, he was stricken with pneumonia. On the last day of February, he died. In the summer the family travelled to Grandmother Perkins house in Newport, Bruen Villa, a virtual museum of old paintings and objets d’art which C. C. Perkins had collected in Florence. She gave Ned and Betty a superb Michelangelo sketch for the Last Supper which they hung in the Plainfield house, (although some later challenged its provenance), and recalled stories of the old days in Italy, banditti in wild passes of the mountains and travelers robbed on the road in the middle of the night – musical soirees in Rome – the Marble Faun – “Harry” and “Willie” James and the family of Charles Eliot Norton. Great Grandmother Bruen rocked in her chair and remembered for the boys the time, when she was just a child, she saw George Washington ride on his white horse in front of New York’s City Hall. She lived to the age of 99, and died in 1892, while Grandmother Frances Davenport Bruen Perkins herself lived on in the Bruen Villa for fifty years until 1909. Every summer the family took the White Mountain Express to Windsor. Senator Evarts left the Skinner house in Windsor, as well as some property across the river in Cornish, to Betty. Fifty years later Van Wyck Brooks vividly remembered visiting with his best friend Max, and recalled "the little girls in pigtails, white dimity and sashes, playing croquet on the lawn in the golden afternoon". The children ran free - swam in Runnemede Pond, canoed on the Connecticut River, climbed Mt. Ascutney, ran through the woods in Paradise with their Evarts cousins, and caught turtles at Ohl’s Pond. You could catch turtles there from the bank, for they would poke their heads up through the weeds and you would grab just behind their head and get the turtle. One day we were doing this. Uncle Edward was looking sharply for a head. He saw one and grabbed, - and brought out a long slimey snake! You know a snake’s head is almost exactly like a turtles. Ned went on to Harvard in 1901. In October of his sophomore year, troubling news came from home. Father had developed a bad cold, and then a fever, and then pneumonia. On All Hallow’s Eve a telegram arrived; Ned rushed back from Harvard and Max was hurried back from St. Paul’s. Ned was 19, Max 17, Carlie 16, Molly 12, Fanny 10, and Louis 6, and at the age of 45, on October 30th 1902, Father was dead.