In December 1874, little Charley’s kidnappers were shot while attempting a burglary. One of them died instantly, but the other confessed to the abduction on his deathbed although he would not give the child’s whereabouts. “The boy will get home all right,” the kidnapper is reported to have said. Christian spent the rest of his life, and the remainder of whatever money had survived the 1873 stock market crash, traveling the world, searching in vain for his lost son. He died of heart failure in 1897. Thereafter, little Charley’s mother, Sarah Ann, took up the search until her death, also of heart failure, in 1912.
The kidnapping became the Ross family’s most enduring personal secret, to the degree that anything so glaringly public could remain under wraps. After the ransom notes, missing for over a century, were unaccountably and accidentally discovered in the basement of a school librarian’s house in northwestern Pennsylvania in March 2012, little Charley’s grandnephew, Chris Ross, a nine-term Pennsylvania state representative, said that his parents’ generation didn’t speak of the disappearance. It was, he said, a forbidden subject. He also said he had no interest in purchasing the ransom notes when they came up for auction. They had, he claimed, caused his family much sadness and trouble and harm.5 It seemed he would prefer the whole affair forgotten.
But a family’s withdrawal, grief, and reticence do not stop a public’s participation, curiosity, and prurience. In the years after the crime, until it was torn down, the Ross mansion—a grand Victorian Italianate set back from the road—was one of Philadelphia’s most visited tourist destinations. “This high old standing home on Washington Lane has melancholy interest all its own,” one contemporary wrote in Ladies’ Home Journal. “It is preeminently Philadelphia’s House of Sorrow.”6
Songs were written, “Bring Back Our Darling” and “I Want to See Mama Once More.” Dozens of articles and books were written about the case: Carrie Hagen’s We Is Got Him: The Kidnapping That Changed America and Norman Zierold’s Little Charley Ross: The Shocking Story of America’s First Kidnapping for Ransom. In the summer of 2000, for an article in the journal Pennsylvania History, Thomas Everly wrote, “Journalists, dime store novelists, mystery writers, amateur historians and crime anthropologists all re-told the narrative in periodicals such as The Daily Graphic and Headline Detective and books entitled Mysteries of the Missing and The Snatch Racket.”
But most harrowing and heartbreaking was the 1876 best seller, written in the desperate hope that one day little Charley would read it, recognize his own story, and make himself known to his family: The Father’s Story of Charley Ross the Kidnapped Child: Containing a Full and Complete Account of the Abduction of Charles Brewster Ross from the Home of His Parents in Germantown, with the Pursuit of the Abductors and Their Tragic Death; the Various Incidents Connected with the Search of the Lost Boy, the Discovery of Other Lost Children, Etc. Etc. With Fac-Similes of Letter from the Abductors. The Whole Carefully Prepared from His Own Notes and Memoranda and from Information Obtained from the Detective Police and Others Engaged in the Search. By Christian K. Ross of Germantown (Philadelphia).
It’s the longest subtitle I’ve ever read, and certainly the most agonized. It was as if, from the outset, Christian could not contain the urgency and insistence of his paternal grief, his “bereavement sharper than death,” as the introduction to the book would have it. But although little Charley’s siblings, the five remaining Ross children, continued to receive claims for decades—thousands of boys, teenagers, and, eventually, men all professing to be the kidnapped child—none of them checked out to any satisfaction.
The only witness to little Charley’s kidnapping, his older brother Walter Ross, grew up and eventually married a beautiful socialite, Julia Peabody Chandler, with whom he had five children. The eldest son was named after himself, Walter Lewis. The second son bore two-thirds of the name of his lost brother, Charles Chandler Ross. It was this Charles Chandler for whom my husband was named, as if the family could not quite give up the memory of little Charley, but was reluctant to impose the full title of the lost child—Charles Brewster Ross—on anyone.
In spite of his early and enduring tragedy, or perhaps because of the morality tale of his father’s lost wealth, Walter Ross was a roaring success by any standard. In 1899, he bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange for a then record sum of $29,000. In 1927, avoiding by two years a repeat of his father’s experience with a stock market crash, he sold it for another record sum of $270,000. Walter and his wife were listed in the Social Register and were members of the Germantown Cricket Club; they had a luxurious home on Chestnut Hill and a summer escape on Saranac Lake.
But in spite of all the social attainments and the cushioning consequence of affluence, it was as if tragedy, having settled on the Rosses, found comfort there and stayed one generation into the next. Julia and Walter’s eldest son, Walter Jr., was all set to become every bit as successful as his father. He married well and had two sons; he showed himself to have inherited astute business acumen. Then, on the night of November 29, 1931, as he and his wife were driving across Campbell’s Bridge near Philadelphia, the steel girders buckled, left their concrete moorings, and the vehicle plunged into Neshaminy Creek thirty-five feet below. Walter Jr. died instantly. His wife survived, my Charlie’s indomitable grandmother, Margaretta Sharpless Ross. She was left with two very young sons: my father-in-law and his older brother.
A few years later, perhaps to recover from her heartbreak, or perhaps to provide her sons with an unequivocally masculine influence, Margaretta Ross took her young boys out west to Wyoming, to spend the summer at the famous Bar B C dude ranch in the shadow of the Teton Mountains. There she fell in love with the co-owner of the ranch, Irving Corse, and eventually married him. When Irving shot himself in 1953 after years of enduring excruciating arthritis, Margaretta took over management of the ranch until her own health declined in the mid-1980s. When I met Charlie in 1991, his grandmother had been dead only three years. “She wasn’t easy,” he said. “I think she was afraid of people taking advantage of her.”
Years later, I boarded my horse on a ranch owned by an elderly woman who had known Margaretta as a younger woman. The elderly woman told me Margaretta was the most difficult person she had ever known, which was really saying something, because the elderly woman was quite difficult herself; hard-drinking, chain-smoking, cantankerous. “When I heard the story about that bridge collapsing, I figured it was about right,” she told me. “If you had met her, you’d know it would take more than a collapsing bridge to kill that tough old cow. God, she was difficult.”
Upon Margaretta’s death in 1988, a life estate negotiated in 1929 by her late husband, Irving Corse, terminated and the Bar B C became part of Grand Teton National Park. From a ranch auction, Charlie acquired a couple of rickety pine beds, a few rough chairs, a dining room table that had been raked by the claws of a marauding black bear, and a cowhide sofa dried to the point of such fragility that one of our guests eventually fell right through it. Charlie also kept his step-grandfather’s cowboy saddle, on the back of which was still the name, written in clear, if fading, white letters: CORSE. It seemed a bad-luck saddle to me, given Irving’s tragic end. The suicide wasn’t much spoken about, of course, but it seemed all the louder to me because of it—the dreadful, conclusive loneliness of that final self-inflicted shot.
The case of little missing Charley Ross dragged on well into living memory. In 1939, a sixty-nine-year-old retired carpenter named Gustave Blair sued Walter Ross, now aged seventy, in an Arizona civil court. He claimed to be the little Charley Ross and wanted a share of his father’s estate, although Walter vehemently denied the existence of any trust. Gustave’s story was as convoluted as it was tragic, but having heard evidence of his fantastical and harrowing tale—the child was allegedly hidden in a cave in Pennsylvania to begin with, and thereafter led a restless, threatened life—the Phoenix judge ruled that the retired carpenter was the “only and origi
nal” Charley Ross. But Walter, wary of imposters, worn out by a lifetime of false claims and dashed hopes, ignored the ruling.
Gustave then requested a jury verdict, and on May 8, 1939, after only eight minutes of deliberation, a jury of twelve men issued on their verdict in the civil action Blair v. Ross. Gustave Blair was, they declared, the lost boy, legally entitled to change his name to Charles Brewster Ross. But Walter continued to refuse to accept the court’s decision. “Blair is evidently just another one of those cranks who have been bothering us for the last sixty-five years,” he told the Associated Press. “The idea that my brother is still alive is not only absurd but the man’s story seems unconvincing.” When Gustave made plans to see Walter in Philadelphia, Walter bolted to his summer cabin on Saranac Lake.
Undeterred by his supposed brother’s reluctance to acknowledge him, Gustave legally changed his name to Charles Brewster Ross. A few months later, he traveled to Pennsylvania with his second wife, Cora, in an attempt to remarry under his freshly retrieved identity in the church that now sat on the site of his old family home. However, given the Ross family’s refusal to recognize the man as their lost brother, the pastor refused the couple’s request. “If my older brother lives for five years, he’ll seek me out and admit kinship,” the latter Charley Brewster Ross declared.
Four years later, in July 1943, Walter died. He was buried in St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church outside Philadelphia. “Above all, he had not allowed his father’s obsession to become his own,” wrote Thomas Everly. “In order to live, he let Charley Ross die.”7 Six months later, the last man claiming to be Walter’s lost brother died of influenza in a Phoenix hospital. But the lingering memory, the nagging doubts about little Charley Ross, meant that he remained stitched into the family’s thinking and soul. He was silently but persistently everywhere.
As a child, my Charlie Ross—Charles Chandler Ross II, named in part for his family’s most enduring tragedy, as had been his great-uncle before him—was taunted by his older brothers. “You’ll get kidnapped,” they predicted. “No one will ever find you again.” But if such taunts terrified Charlie at the time, he not did not later cite them as the source of his hypervigilance against the world’s injustice, or his amorphous but persistent sense that he was not living the life to which he had been entitled. In any case, the taunts were nothing compared to the threats his brothers delivered to throw him from the third-story window of their house, and their subsequent denials of any such behavior.
“It was just what brothers do,” he said.
“Is that code for something?” I asked.
Charlie looked blank. “Code for what?”
And when in 1997 Charlie suggested naming our son Charles Ross, it didn’t apparently occur to him, and certainly not to me, until someone else pointed it out, that we were keeping alive the name of the missing child. So on and on the missing went, well after little Charley could possibly have still been alive, as if the itch of him yearned to be uncovered. “Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.”
There is no loneliness quite like the loneliness that comes from living without ancestors, without the constant, lively accompaniment of the dead. And it was true, the people I knew on the farms and ranches of my youth accepted their dead relatives into their houses and bodies, not in the way Christians might accept the Eucharist—a weekly ritual—but in vivid daydreams, in the conception, birth, and rearing of their children, in the ingestion of every meal. The dead, disentangled from the prison of their flesh, were expected to engage in a busy, even mischievous afterlife, affecting weather, health, and fertility. They did not disappear, and freeze or desiccate beneath a slab of stone, or in some vault. They did not leave wealth or reliable inheritances of property for their successors. Nor did they rest in peace.
THE RIVER RUNNER AND THE RAT RACE
When we first arrived in the United States, I got a job five days a week as a river guide in Jackson, Wyoming. I wasn’t very good at it, but I earned twenty dollars a trip, and other than cracking my chin open on a rock, no one got hurt on my raft. Three evenings and one lunch shift a week, I waitressed at a high-end restaurant in town. I wasn’t very good at that either, but it was busy season, help was hard to find, and no one at my tables actually starved to death. On good nights, I could earn a couple of hundred dollars in tips. It seemed like a small fortune until Charlie told me it wasn’t enough. He explained that a house was very expensive. Childcare was very expensive. Health insurance was very expensive. Then I realized my unskilled labor wouldn’t be worth anything in the winter. In September, when the cold weather came, river operations would shut down and the restaurant would close for the off-season, and then where would I be?
I hadn’t thought it through, to be honest. It’s not that I wasn’t familiar with seasons. Growing up on farms in southern Africa, I was very aware that we had cooler dry seasons and hotter rainy seasons. We’d reaped and we’d sowed. But regardless of whether crops were going into the ground or coming out of it, we had always seemed more or less short of money. “We’re on the bones of our arses,” Dad would say. But he said it in a way that suggested being poor wasn’t a bad thing; if anything it was a jokey thing.
On the other hand, when Charlie showed me our budget and presented a list of numbers that would not zero out, it was not a jokey thing. I didn’t really understand the accounts, nor did I understand the words that were coming out of his mouth, but what he told me with his body, his quietly contagious anxiety, made me nearly dizzy with panic. I picked up an extra shift at the restaurant. Then summer ended, and I found part-time office work at just above minimum wage. Meantime, I woke up at four in the morning and worked on a novel about a lonely, unhappy Zimbabwean housewife whose husband ignores her and never laughs at her jokes until she runs off with an aid worker woman and opens a florist called the Placid Lily. Charlie looked for a job—but not just any job. He wanted to earn a real wage, he said. I said I thought all wages were real; what was surreal, I told him, was the cost of everything here.
Then Charlie came home one day and announced that he was going to be an estate agent in Jackson. To begin with, I didn’t understand what he was telling me. And then when I did, I reacted poorly. I burst into tears and said it would kill his soul to sell houses here and to develop land. This, after all, was the earth he loved above all else: this was where he had planted himself as a seventeen-year-old; these rivers had taught him to read water; these were the snow-peaked mountains he had dreamed of on hot nights in Zambia. Charlie got angry and asked me if I had any better ideas. I said I had dozens: we could move back to southern Africa and live in a hut; we could move into a teepee and wait for one of my books to get published; we could sell our bodies to science. I said there had to be something that Charlie could do that didn’t involve the murder of his spirit.
It took Charlie more than a year to sell his first property. In the course of those long, worrying months, he was tired all the time and felt nonspecifically unwell. Eventually he was diagnosed with having profound environmental allergies: sagebrush, aspen, grasses, dust. Charlie’s body had turned his treasured, chosen world against him. I took books out of the library and read everything I could find on allergies and autoimmune disorders. “You’re fighting against yourself,” I told Charlie. “You need to find work that fulfills you.” But bills piled up faster than I could imagine our way back to a simpler life; a life in which our means exceeded our wants; a life in which we could explore what it was that we were born to do, rather than what we needed to do.
Feeling complicit in Charlie’s fatigue and ill health, I made myself busier than ever. I was still working three days a week, taking care of Sarah on my days off, cooking, cleaning, and waking up early every morning to write. I had moved on to a new novel, the first one unsurprisingly having been rejected by publishing houses everywhere. Then my second novel got unsurprisingly reje
cted too. It seemed to me, our safe, sane American lives weren’t any easier than our crazy, diseased African ones. Charlie talked about the way things used to be when he lived here in the seventies and eighties. I invited his friends over and tried to recast his nostalgia in the present tense. But it wasn’t ever going to be enough; I couldn’t rewind the clock back to those happier, simpler times. I suffered from bouts of depression and I missed Zambia.
But I was losing much of what had made me southern African; our toughness, our humor, our hardiness—these didn’t translate easily in a culture that had made comfort the primary goal, and challenging that comfort something we did on weekends, for fun in the mountains, on the ends of ropes, or on bikes and horses. Also, identity is easily corruptible. As soon as we mistake our ease for our security, our conveniences for our human rights, our luxuries for our entitlements, we aren’t culturally distinct anymore. Then we’re part of someone else’s corporate plan, we’re a predictable, fulfilled expectation; we’re a black dot on a bottom line. Retaining culture takes effort and persistence and discipline. It’s a commitment, not a flag. You can’t just pull it out and wave it about when it’s convenient.
At last Charlie had some real estate deals—the sound of nail guns echoed in frenetic new subdivisions in the forests all around us—and suddenly there was some extra cash around. I felt guiltily relieved. I no longer had to add up each item in my grocery cart to make sure I wouldn’t go over our modest budget. We sold our house in Idaho and moved to Jackson. But Charlie didn’t seem happier—if anything I was even more aware of the multiple ways I was failing to be the person he expected me to be.