OPEN BOOK T An Aristocrat’s E Summer at the Beach L For 42 summers, George Howe Colt ’76 repaired to the four-story, 11-bedroom ark of E a summer house his great-grandfather Ned Atkinson built on a Cape Cod peninsula in 1903. Now the members of the extended family who own the romantic, Killing V run-down place have decided they must sell it. Colt goes there with his family for I one last August. The sadness of impending change—but wait, may change be ome homicides just won’t die. The S tempered?—pervades his charming memoir, The Big House: A Century in the Life of an 1849 murder and dismemberment of American Summer Home (Scribner, $25). His evocative tale will resonate with all Brahmin George Parkman, I who have loved a summer home, of whatever dimensions, as the following passage A.B. 1809, a compulsive, disagreeable, O may suggest. and embittered landlord and N Smoneylender (who had failed in a medical ow many Boston Brahmins Williamsburg, the Big House is to be career) still roils the imaginations of histo- does it take to screw in a light- preserved intact, uncontaminated either rians. Simon Schama, a onetime Harvard bulb? Ten: one to put in the by throwing anything out or by will- history professor now teaching at Colum- new bulb, and nine to remi- ingly introducing anything new. Any bia, exercised the crafts of both history nisce about how great the old change is likely the result of serendipity: and fiction in Dead Certainties, his 1991 book oneH was. If it used to be done this way, it a book left on a bedside table, a shell on on the Parkman case. Now, Murder at Har- ought to be done this way, and, by God, it a mantelpiece, a toy car on the kitchen vard, an hour-long television documentary will be done this way. We would never floor. If no one removes them immedi- directed by Eric Stange, visiting fellow in tolerate the Big House’s inconveniences ately, they will likely be granted tenure. the Charles Warren Center for Studies in in our winter homes, but this is Several years ago, an iron bedstead in American History, and written by Stange, di≠erent: we change in the winter, but the Little Nursery lost a caster. For two Schama, and Melissa Banta, curatorial as- during the summer—a season in which summers the resulting tilt was ignored. sociate at the Library,

R, INC., NEW YORK we regress to an innocent, Edenic state This summer we arrived to find that a exhumes the Parkman case once again. by replicating the experiences we had as copy of Tess of the d’Urbervilles had been Schama narrates the American Experience children—change is heresy. We bristle placed under the shortened leg. We program, which PBS airs nationally on when guests expect, well, something a haven’t touched it. Recently, sweeping Monday, July 14, at 9 p.m. little more deluxe. Were we to stop up after a weekend of houseguests, I Harvard Medical College professor washing the dishes by hand, it would came across a guitar pick. For the time , A.B. 1811, M.D. 1815, mean losing not was arrested and eventually hanged for only the opportu- the Parkman murder; his trial in 1850 nity to watch the attracted press from as far away as Lon- boats sail into the don, Paris, and Berlin. Yet some, like the harbor, but a pre- late surgeon and cious daily chunk professor Francis D. Moore ’35, M.D. ’39, of WASP bonding S.D. ’82, who appears on the program, (which is performed believe that Webster may have been inno- far more adhesively cent. Some suspect that Ephraim over a mildewed Littlefield, a janitor and tra∞cker in dead dish towel than bodies who worked “downstairs” at the over a beer). Were Medical College and despised Webster, we to replace the may have framed him. (Littlefield discov- hypersensitive toi- ered—or planted—Parkman’s dismem- lets, so aged that bered corpse beneath Webster’s lab.) 2003 BY GEORGE HOWE COLT. REPRINTED BY ARRANGEMENT WITH SCRIBNER, AN IMPRINT OF SIMON & SCHUSTE their porcelain handles are spider- The Big House, Wings Neck, Pocasset In the documentary, MIT historian webbed with cracks, it would mean tak- Pauline Maier ’60, Ph.D. ’68, and Harvard ing down the typewritten notes my being, I put it in the wooden dish on the clinical assistant in surgery Anthony Pat- grandmother thumbtacked in each of front-hall shelf where the key to the ton ’54, M.D. ’58, among others, chew over the seven bathrooms, whose words we Chelsea clock is kept. I know that if the the Rashomon-like ambiguities of compet- can recite by heart now, like an a≠ec- house were not being sold, that guitar ing versions of what really happened when tionate family mantra: “Nothing but toi- pick would remain there for decades, as Parkman visited Webster in his labora-

BY GEORGE HOWE COLT. COPYRIGHT © let paper—and not wads of this—to go immovable as a barnacle. My grandchil- tory to dun him for payment of a debt. in toilets. Cesspool trouble possible, dren would assume that Ned Atkinson (Parkman essentially held mortgages on though not probable, if we watch.” played the guitar, and would venerate all Webster’s worldly goods; the latter, a

THE BIG HOUSE Like Plimoth Plantation or Colonial the pick as a holy relic. Boston blueblood himself, had squandered

FROM his inheritance and had lived beyond his

24 July - August 2003 Photograph courtesy of George Colt Network with Harvard Magazine ASHEVILLE SCHOOL www.ashevilleschool.org

BIRCH BAY VILLAGE www.birchbayinfo.com

BROOKHAVEN AT LEXINGTON www.aboutbrookhaven.org

CADBURY COMMONS www.cadburycommons.com

CANON POWERSHOT www.powershot.com

CAROL WOODS www.carolwoods.org PUBLIC BROADCASTING SYSTEM CHRYSLER PACIFICA means for years.) Several scenes dramatize wave of Irish immigrants who fled to www.pacifica.chrysler.com “possible” versions of encounters among Boston during the potato famines of the COLDWELL BANKER/CURRIER the three protagonists. 1840s (local aristocrats grumbled that www.beehome.com Shot in black-and-white to evoke the “the Athens of America was becoming the COLDWELL BANKER/OLSON period, Murder at Harvard also peers into Dublin of America”). At the end, Schama www.coldwellbanker-Cambridge.com the class frictions that were a backdrop to pronounces his own verdict, complete the event. Some speculation, for example, with a reenactment of the murder scene. DUNCASTER RETIREMENT www.duncaster.org locates a homicidal rage in Littlefield, a The result is a thinking person’s who- “swamp Yankee” equally resentful of so- dunit, and a televised glimpse into a grisly FIDUCIARY TRUST INTERNATIONAL cial superiors like Webster and of the chapter of Harvard history. c.l. www.fiduciarytrust.com GLOBAL FINANCIAL CONCEPTS www.globalfinancial.com CHAPTER & VERSE GREGORIAN ORIENTAL RUGS A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words www.atgregorian.com

José Rigau would appreciate help in less millions who, at the Door of victory, HAMMOND REAL ESTATE www.hammondre.com identifying the person (possibly French sat down to wait, and waiting—died!” historian Charles Seignobos) who de- HAMMOND REAL ESTATE fined enlightened despotism as “All for “Fougère” (May-June 2003). Laurence www.carolandmyra.com the people, but without the people.” Senelick identified Eugénie Fougère, a HARVARD ATHLETICS French singer and dancer noted for eye- www.athletics.harvard.edu author, work, catching outfits, frisky movements, sug- Dinsmore Murphy seeks HARVARD BOOK STORE and date for “…led onward without will gestive demeanor, and her ragtime cake- www.harvard.com of their own by their former striving.” walk “Hello, Ma Baby.” She performs, wrote Gerelyn Hollingsworth, at http://- HARVARD EXTENSION SCHOOL www.dce.harvard.edu Eugene Pattison asks if anyone knows a memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/- prior source for Louisa May Alcott’s varstg:@field(NUMBER(1094)). HOLLAND & COMPANY “saying,” from Jo’s Boys, “Clay represents www.hollandbalancedfund.com life; plaster, death; marble, immortality.” “desire…” (May-June 2003). John Croke THE INN AT HARVARD located Yeats’s source in Samuel Taylor www.theinnatharvard.com “plains of hesitation” (May-June 2003). Coleridge’s Table Talk: “The man’s desire THE RIGHT STUFF William Waterhouse found George W. is for the woman; but the woman’s de- www.rightstuffdating.com Cecil’s text, for a 1928 advertisement for sire is rarely other than for the desire of International Correspondence Schools, the man” (July 23, 1827). RIVERWOODS AT EXETER www.riverwoodsrc.org in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quota- tions Requested from the Congressional Re- Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter VERITASRING search Service (GPO, 1989): “On the Plains and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware www.veritasring.com of Hesitation bleach the bones of count- Street, Cambridge 02138. VILLAGE AT DUXBURY www.welchhrg.com/villageatduxbury/

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