Mary Hallock (Molly) wrote about her first encounter with Helena:
“And then Helena dawned on my nineteenth year like a rose pink winter sunrise, in the bare halls of Cooper, sweet and cold after her walk up from the ferry. Staten Island was her home; a subsidiary aunt had taken me in that winter who lived on Long Island and I crossed by an uptown ferry and walked down. Across the city we came together and across the world in some respects. She was the daughter of Commodore de Kay, a granddaughter of Joseph Rodman Drake, and Henry Eckford, on the other side; her people belonged to the old aristocracy of New York. (Editor’s Note: The Commodore was a South American naval hero, Drake was the very earliest of the American poets, and Eckford built ships and created the American Navy, and all were quite crazy in their own way.) My people belonged to nothing except the Society of Friends, and not to that any longer in good standing. She had spent her childhood abroad and spoke three languages. I ‘one, imperfectly’; she had lived in one of the famous capitols of Europe and walked galleries among the Old Masters, while I was walking the old green hills of the Hudson and wandering through the Long Pond woods, and my longest journey at that time had been to Rochester, N.Y. She said she was a professional, but her friends were New York society girls and private pupils; she was in the painting class, I, in another part of the building, in Black and White, but we both stayed in the afternoons and had time for many talks, comparing our past lives and dreams for the future.
“By spring we were calling each other Helena and Molly, and we sat together at anatomy lectures and Friday composition class and scribbled quotations and remarks to each other on the margins of our notebooks. I still keep one of these loose pages of my youth with “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments-“ copied in pencil in her bold and graceful hand, and on the other side in the same hand the words which began our life correspondence, not gushingly nor lightly; a certain hesitation was but natural on my side, which might have had the effect of reserve, and her side there were hosts of other claims. She already had a world of friendships on her hands. We wrote to each other for fifty years. She came up to Milton that following summer and every summer after till there was no more Milton for me – not that Milton! (Her home town.) Her sharing in books and friends were the stored honey of my girlhood. The strings were tuned high for us in those years, but after we became wives and mothers, and had lost our own mothers (she loved mine and I loved hers), a settled, homely quality took the place of that first passion of my life, Salt is added to dried rose leaves with the perfume and spices when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.”[1]
Cooper Union was the best place in New York City to get art instruction. Peter Cooper believed that a quality education should be accessible to those who qualify, independent of their race, religion, sex, wealth or social status, and should be open and free to all. The Cooper Union granted each admitted student a full-tuition scholarship. There were around two hundred students enrolled in the art section of the school. One hundred and fifty men, fifty women. The women attended classes during the day, the men at night. Cooper wasn’t much of an artist, so he hired artists to tell him how it should be done. He had the very best artists in the city teaching there.
There was a group of women art students who became fast friends. Helena, and Mary (Molly) and Emma Beach. Katie Bloede, Maria Oakey, and Olivia Ward were the other three women of their group. They enrolled just before the end of the Civil War. The six of them remained friends throughout their lives. One of their male classmates, Abbott Thayer, ended up marrying two of them.
Lincoln gave his campaign speech in its basement auditorium in 1860 that convinced New York City to vote for him. The original building is still there. Its Italian Renaissance brownstone building was the first in the world to be built with an elevator shaft; because Cooper, in 1853, was confident an elevator would soon be invented.
For Helena, the war ended in 1865 when the 20th Maine Regiment marched in an impromptu parade down Broadway from the Battery to a steamer which was to take them to Boston. She had overheard that some of her classmates were going. She went, but didn’t find any of her girlfriends. She did find Abbott Thayer and Gus Saint-Gaudens. Gus was slightly younger, very angular and skinny, and very gregarious. He was making cameos in a shop nearby. He was one of the boys that liked to march about Central Park after the evening classes, arm in arm, singing as loudly as they could. She had heard him one night and thought he had a very good voice. The two boys acted rather shyly with her, but she was glad to find them there. Thayer asked after Katie, even though he had probably seen her more than Helena had. The onlookers were very enthusiastic. There were lots of cheering. It was great fun.
And her older brothers, Drake and Sydney were finally to return home to the city from their war duties. Her other brother had been buried in New Orleans where he died in 1862.
The war ended for Richard in Philadelphia. He was working for Newark Advertiser as a reporter and had gone into the city to report on Lincoln’s funeral train that stopped there. He had been a private in Landis’ Philadelphia Battery at the time of Robert E. Lee’s 1863 invasion of Pennsylvania. After the Confederates were defeated in the Battle of Gettysburg, his outfit was disbanded without seeing any further action.
Thousands had turned out to pay their last respects and had filed through to view the open casket. The Funeral Director had been required to clean the dust from the president’s face several times that day because of the endless trudging shoes passing. Richard had never actually seen Lincoln and this would be the last opportunity. But it looked like he had arrived too late. The police had drawn their line across the path in front of Independence Hall. The last man in line on the other side of the police was a slender man with a thick brown beard and moustache. He was removing his jacket. It was a spring evening and cool away from the crowd, but the close quarters of the line looked stuffy. He was as rail thin as Richard, although older. They might pass as brothers. He looked back at Richard over the shoulder of the policeman between them.
The man reached out his open hand to Richard. The policeman eyed him.
“This is my childhood chum,” he told the man. “We were to meet here, but his mother was ill. Can he come through? We fought the Rebels side by side.”
The policeman stepped out of the way and Richard took the man’s hand and was the last in line.
“Chum,” Richard whispered. “Thanks. I’m Richard Gilder.”
“Thomas Moran, but you can call me Tom – all my chums do.” He grinned.
In the next hour as they shuffled forward, they talked. Moran was a painter. He was seven years older than Richard. Moran had been in Europe studying during the war. It was that time in Richard’s life that everyone he met and became friends with were about seven years older than he was. It seemed natural. Tom was a big reader; there was a great number of books that they both had read. Richard confessed his desire to write poetry. They both agreed that Browning’s “Dramatis Personae” that had been published the year before was a work of true genius. Browning had just lost his wife and it seemed to drive the poems’ intensities. Richard talked of losing his father in the war, something he never spoke of.
When they finally reached the window display of the casket in the lights and the flowers, there was nothing at all to say. Richard almost wept. His new friend patted his back.
Richard was invited to Moran’s house. There would be writers and artists to meet that gathered there.
He walked on alone to the train station with the wailing music of the funeral dirge behind him. The progression approached and the funeral train moved out beneath the stars.
[1] Mary Hallock Foote “A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West”