other, tended only by a private nurse and my manservant, Alfred Kinney.
My doctors have done all they can to prolong my life. I’ve undergone several surgeries, as well as radiation treatments by Dr. Gioacchino Failla at Memorial Hospital in New York. I hope these procedures have given me the few months I need to tell the story of that love as only I know it before I join Aimée and Garrison in death.
I am in constant pain, but I refuse the morphine my doctors offer, for I know it will cloud my mind and make it impossible for me to finish the task I have set myself.
I write for no other eyes but my own and those of my children and grandchildren, and then only when they are old enough to understand the tragic events that transpired in that wretched summer of 1904. It seems right to me that those whom Aimée and I brought into the world should be allowed to know the truth of how she left it. And the guilt I have suffered ever since for the role I played in her death. But no one else. Our family has already suffered too much from the lies and from the public shaming of the remarkable woman who was my wife. Showing these pages beyond our direct line would only revive the chatter we were forced to live through and would serve no purpose whatsoever. The dead would remain dead.
Sitting here on the island, as darkness falls, I ponder how to tell the tale. I suppose I should begin at the beginning. Not with my birth, like Copperfield, but with my year in Paris. The year my father gave me to “sow my wild oats.” The year I met Aimée and fell in love with the most remarkable woman I have ever known.
In June 1894 I graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, near the top of my class, with a degree in Naval Architecture. Though I’d pursued my studies assiduously, my true passion at the time was art. From my earliest years I’d seldom been without a sketchpad or paints and canvas. While completing my degree at MIT, I simultaneously completed a course of study at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the basement in Copley Square. I was a good painter, and my work earned high praise from my instructors. While I knew I was talented, I was not yet as good as I wanted to be.
The Sunday after graduation, the Whitby family went en masse, as was our wont, to services at St. Luke’s Cathedral on State Street in Portland. After returning to the house, I planned to tell my father that before I joined the firm, I intended to go to Paris to study art.
The coach let us off under the porte cochere. Before going in, I stopped my father and told him there was something important we needed to discuss. He looked at me with his dark eyes and invited me into his private study overlooking the back gardens. I always hated that room, for it was there, throughout my childhood, that punishment had been meted out. I still bore the scars, mental as well as physical, of the beatings I suffered in that room from the buckle on my dear papa’s favorite leather belt.
We entered the study. He sat at his desk. I sat in the same straight-backed chair he’d once used for the beatings. He waited for me to speak. It was like being called into the headmaster’s office. But my father, in his silence, was far more frightening than any mere headmaster.
“What is so important we need to talk about it today?” he finally asked.
“Art,” I said. Actually, I think it came out more as a squeak than the actual word.
“Art. What about art?” He said the word art in a sneering way, as though it was something unworthy of serious discussion by a man of his stature. I sensed this was going to be one of the most difficult conversations we’d ever had.
“I graduated MIT just as you wanted me to. Magna cum laude, just as you hoped.”
“Actually, I hoped for summa. Which I think you might have made had you not snuck out to Copley Square three evenings a week.”
I wasn’t sure how he knew about that. I’d paid the art school fees
My doctors have done all they can to prolong my life. I’ve undergone several surgeries, as well as radiation treatments by Dr. Gioacchino Failla at Memorial Hospital in New York. I hope these procedures have given me the few months I need to tell the story of that love as only I know it before I join Aimée and Garrison in death.
I am in constant pain, but I refuse the morphine my doctors offer, for I know it will cloud my mind and make it impossible for me to finish the task I have set myself.
I write for no other eyes but my own and those of my children and grandchildren, and then only when they are old enough to understand the tragic events that transpired in that wretched summer of 1904. It seems right to me that those whom Aimée and I brought into the world should be allowed to know the truth of how she left it. And the guilt I have suffered ever since for the role I played in her death. But no one else. Our family has already suffered too much from the lies and from the public shaming of the remarkable woman who was my wife. Showing these pages beyond our direct line would only revive the chatter we were forced to live through and would serve no purpose whatsoever. The dead would remain dead.
Sitting here on the island, as darkness falls, I ponder how to tell the tale. I suppose I should begin at the beginning. Not with my birth, like Copperfield, but with my year in Paris. The year my father gave me to “sow my wild oats.” The year I met Aimée and fell in love with the most remarkable woman I have ever known.
In June 1894 I graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, near the top of my class, with a degree in Naval Architecture. Though I’d pursued my studies assiduously, my true passion at the time was art. From my earliest years I’d seldom been without a sketchpad or paints and canvas. While completing my degree at MIT, I simultaneously completed a course of study at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the basement in Copley Square. I was a good painter, and my work earned high praise from my instructors. While I knew I was talented, I was not yet as good as I wanted to be.
The Sunday after graduation, the Whitby family went en masse, as was our wont, to services at St. Luke’s Cathedral on State Street in Portland. After returning to the house, I planned to tell my father that before I joined the firm, I intended to go to Paris to study art.
The coach let us off under the porte cochere. Before going in, I stopped my father and told him there was something important we needed to discuss. He looked at me with his dark eyes and invited me into his private study overlooking the back gardens. I always hated that room, for it was there, throughout my childhood, that punishment had been meted out. I still bore the scars, mental as well as physical, of the beatings I suffered in that room from the buckle on my dear papa’s favorite leather belt.
We entered the study. He sat at his desk. I sat in the same straight-backed chair he’d once used for the beatings. He waited for me to speak. It was like being called into the headmaster’s office. But my father, in his silence, was far more frightening than any mere headmaster.
“What is so important we need to talk about it today?” he finally asked.
“Art,” I said. Actually, I think it came out more as a squeak than the actual word.
“Art. What about art?” He said the word art in a sneering way, as though it was something unworthy of serious discussion by a man of his stature. I sensed this was going to be one of the most difficult conversations we’d ever had.
“I graduated MIT just as you wanted me to. Magna cum laude, just as you hoped.”
“Actually, I hoped for summa. Which I think you might have made had you not snuck out to Copley Square three evenings a week.”
I wasn’t sure how he knew about that. I’d paid the art school fees
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