(7-95) During the winters of his childhood, the family lived in a mansion in New Haven, where his father was a professor at Yale. His salary as an assistant professor was only a few thousand a year, but he and his wife Alfreda were the recipients of a more-than-generous living allowance from Alfreda's mother.
(7-96) Their mansion, larger than the president's house at Yale, had French governesses, art books, German nurses, sculpture, a gymnasium on the third floor, huge rooms with arched windows, Louis Comfort Tiffany glass vases, and a three-car garage with a chauffeur in residence.
Harry and Rose
may have expected to live out their lives in the
glittering capitals of the world, but Harry's resignation
from the Foreign Service brought them home to Salem and
this 18th century house. For 50 years, the house held
their secret.
(7-97 Summers were spent in Salem where Alfred Mitchell, Harry's
grandfather, had purchased several thousand acres of land that had
once belonged to and been farmed by Mitchell ancestors. On a hill
overlooking these family lands, Harry's parents built a summer
residence called the Camp. The seven Bingham boys spent every
summer of their growing-up years in this rambling one-story
structure where my grandmother cultivated the "simple" life
ý la Marie Antoinette. It overlooked the Mumford House,
another family house, built in the early years of the 18th
century, and surrounded by thousands of acres of pastures, streams
and thick forest.
(7-98) It was the Mumford House that Harry was to inherit from his granny and the Mumford House in which Harry would return to live after leaving the Foreign Service. Here, he would spend the last four decades of his life.
(7-99) Salem, Connecticut, was not the place Rose Morrison Bingham had expected to live. After all, as a young debutante and the niece of a senator, she had been presented to the Queen of England. Harry had been her charming and handsome escort. It did not seem unrealistic for her to dream of being an ambassador's wife, housed in palatial mansions in all the shining capitals of the world.
(7-100) In the 1940s, Salem was a crossroads between two tiny highways, halfway between Hartford and New London and deep in the Connecticut countryside. And the only other inhabitants on the huge parcel of family land were Harry's brothers and their not-very-nice wives. One of those wives was my mother Norris, who had been chatelaine of the valley for a decade and had no desire to see her social position threatened.
(7-101) "Oh, Harry and Rose just sailed back into Salem and expected to be invited to just everything. Well, I mean I couldn't invite her to everything now, could I?"
(7-102) Norris tells the story of one dinner party Rose had not been invited to. Rose showed up anyway and pressed her face to the dining room window and just looked in. Several of the children came with her and they, too, plastered their faces up against the glass.
(7-103) "It was just awful!" snorts Norris. "And then there were always two or three Mumford House children just showing up at the door, expecting to be fed, some of them with their dirty diapers just trailing down around their knees."
(7-104) In the Foreign Service, Rose had always had servants. Now there was no one to help her with the children. Or the housekeeping. The laundry alone for eight children, one of them a newborn, was an enormous amount of work.
(7-105) Rose always used to laugh about it with me. "I just gave up," she shrugged and moued charmingly, "What could I do?"
(7-106) She did her best. She took long walks. She thought deep thoughts. She loved high tide in Long Island Sound. She took comfort from nature. By April she was already swimming in the brook, and striding on her long legs all through the valley. I remember her sitting out on the lawn with the latest of what was eventually to be 11 children on her lap while the others literally climbed the walls and roofs and ran wild around her.
(7-107 Harry truly thought that each life he helped bring into the world was a "miracle," but raising eleven children was making money a real problem.
(7-108) Harry told me, "I never made more than $5,000 in the state department."
(7-109) Without more lucrative promotions, there would not even have been enough to support his family, let alone provide the tuition for a Groton and Yale education, a necessity, he felt, for the boys. Choosing to resign meant he had lost his pension.
(7-110) To make matters worse, soon after he returned from Argentina he fell prey to a con woman. Harry was returning by train from a disappointing business trip to New York, and when he returned from the dining car, a charming lady was sitting in his seat. They fell to talking and he was soon sharing his story with her. She convinced him she had a wonderful money-making scheme, and that she would promote his ideas for a new steel-making process if he would give her some money to invest in a sure-thing real-estate venture.
(7-111) Over the next few weeks, Harry signed over $100,000 to this woman.
(7-112) "That was half of more than everything I owned," said Harry. The embezzlement was further proof to him that people were out to get him. He became convinced this woman had been sent by people who wanted to keep hidden his ideas about Argentina and a world-wide conspiracy to help the Nazis.
(7-113) That box of papers got pushed ever deeper into the closet.
(7-114) Though Rose was too Southern and too polite to voice her anger and disappointment in front of others, Abby, their third daughter, remembers hearing from another room her parents quarreling about money. I am sure Harry felt keenly that he had disappointed Rose with his lack of success in the Foreign Service. In the last year of her life, Rose told her daughter that she still had vivid dreams of being an ambassador's wife.
