The Foxcatcher Horseshoe

“Wrestling is a low sport,” said Jean Lisiter Du Pont to her son. It wasn’t the first activity her son John had pursued with a passion. After graduating with the Haverford School’s class of 1957, John Eleuthere Du Pont threw himself into swimming, and within six years, he was training with the nation’s most prestigious team in Santa Clara. But although he was in the same water as Olympians, it would be presumptuous to assume that he was in the same league as them. He wasn’t even close. In fact, they treated him as a bit of a joke.

“He was not even a good swimmer,” said the Olympic gold medalist Donna de Varona, some decades later, in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “He was there because somebody had written a big check."

Such is the peril of being an ambitious dilettante with access to tens of millions of dollars of inherited wealth. You get to indulge your whims, but not earn any respect. Not even from your mother. Jean kept John in check for as long as she lived. She provided structure that any growing child needs… but with John’s frail mental health, she had to provide that structure all through adulthood too. When he married, and fell into drunken threats and abuse, his mother took him under her wing throughout his transition back into the life of a single, extremely wealthy, mentally ill young man.

When he switched from swimming to fencing, flying helicopters, and buying army surplus tanks, she kept him on the straight and narrow. At least she had the comfort of knowing that her son's sporting interests included her favorite sport: Equestrianism.

Jean kept a stable of rare Welsh ponies and took all the local gymkhana girls under her wing. After competing in the nearby Devon Horse Show, all the young ladies of Philadelphia’s Main Line who loved show jumping and dressage would be invited to the Du Pont estate for a party. And John would occasionally stop by, if his drinking had not incapacitated him completely.

The story of John’s eventual descent into madness and murder is well known. After Jean Du Pont died, John lost his ties to order and sanity and became increasingly paranoid. He shot a wrestler who was training at the estate, and he was arrested, tried, found insane but culpable, and spend his last years incarcerated in a mental facility.

His estate lay guarded but decaying until he died, and then his prodigious collections were auctioned off, and the property bulldozed to the ground. The estate is now sprouting high-dollar townhomes and McMansions, but before the demolition began, I gained permission to tour the estate that was about to be demolished. I saw the mansion where the fugitive heir holed up from the Newtown Square police after the murder. I saw the greenhouses. And I went to the stables. In the corner was a pile of old horse shoes. This lot is one of those horseshoes. It was rusty when I pocketed it. I painted it with a rust-inhibiting black spray paint. Then, in a fit of whimsy, I brushed some gold decorative paint over the top, to hint at the huge amount of wealth that had bought the estate that housed the family that bred the horses that wore this shoe, till it was too worn to be used, and was pulled off and tossed into the corner, ready for a visitor to pick up, before looking around to make sure nobody could see him, and slip into his pocket.

This horseshoe stands as stark evidence that phenomenal amounts of money do not bring harmony or happiness to those that inherit them. But perhaps, like horseshoes all over the world, this one will bring its new owners, not unimaginable wealth and everything that goes with it, but a modest measure of good luck.

The Best Buttonholes in Edinburgh

Detail of a hand-made cotton underskirt/petticoat, 1910s-1920s 

My grandmother made the best buttonholes in Edinburgh. She said so herself, but she wasn’t the only one: Everyone else said so too. She had a Singer sewing machine (still in my Aunt Mary’s living room) for straight seams, but the buttonholes were made by hand. The inner end of the hole, the part the button rubs against, is slightly rounded so it can withstand more wear. The edges of the buttonhole are reinforced and beautified by, of course, buttonhole stitch. 

Sabina Cameron, my grandmother, was the seventh of eight children (“Seventh child of a seventh child,” she would say). Her father died when she was three years old, in 1891, and his widow had to take in laundry to make ends meet. The boys went to a school for fatherless boys, but these did not exist for girls, so my grandmother had to leave school at the age of 14, and start working in a dressmaker’s shop. The work must have paid a single girl well enough, because within a decade beautiful postcards with her photograph began to appear, showing her with elegantly coiffed long hair and wonderful dresses that she must have made herself. 

She met my grandfather in 1916 at a dance in Edinburgh Castle, and they married in 1918, at the end of WWI; he had served in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. In their engagement photograph he is staunch and upright in his kilt, wearing puttees, while she sits almost hunched and crooked, like a bit of a siren: the Protestant girl who would convert to Catholicism to marry him.  

After they married, the couple moved to London and then Yorkshire, where my grandfather taught mathematics. Before they started a family—late in life, for those days—he would ride around on his motorcycle and she would ride in the sidecar. This is when I imagine she made this wonderful underskirt for herself: the waist measures about 26 inches, and the drawstring through a pleated section can make it even tighter. Their first child wasn’t born until they were 37, so she could have worn this slender garment for years, but it is so well preserved that it might have been worn only a few times. It shows signs of age but not of wear. 

No one in my generation or the younger wave of home seamstresses does needlework like this. This is a garment that was made to last as long as its owner was beautiful. It has traveled more than six thousand miles from its origins in Edinburgh or London or the West Riding of Yorkshire, across to Colorado, circling back in the past couple of months to Pennsylvania. And it has taken on something of everywhere it has been: The garment smells of scented soap, a bit of English damp, and an overlay of dry Colorado—where we found it carefully folded in a box among my mother’s things, after her death. She left no record that it was my grandmother’s work, but it’s obvious where this hand-crafted garment came from. 

The perfectly even Singer-stitched thread, with occasional hand-stitched runs, pleating the ivory cotton at the waist. The buttons are hand-covered with fabric so they match the rest of the garment perfectly. The waist has no elastic: It has a quarter-inch drawstring made of the same fine ivory fabric. It has three tiers, ending in a hem of two layers, ruffled with horizontal pleats and hand-trimmed, scalloped machine-made lace. It was clearly made by a professional.  

The two buttonholes down the side show that she was at the peak of her skills. 

It’s not at all a stretch to imagine that these buttonholes are the work of the best buttonhole-maker in Edinburgh, making garments for herself, and perhaps thinking of the handsome kilt-wearing groom who walked her down the aisle a few years earlier.