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Call Me A Bastard is a weekly serialized book that tells the true and scandalous story of Aimee Henry and Mary Martha Parker. New chapters are released each Tuesday beginning June 25, 2024. Subscribe for free today, and we’ll deliver Call Me a Bastard and a bunch of other fantastic free content to your email each week! Aimee Henry was just six in the fall of 1897 when the woman she called “Aunt Martha” sent her to Miss Kimball's School for Girls. Source: The Lost & Found Story Box. | Lori White Olson | 1 | |||||
Aimee Henry's classmates at Mrs. Mead's School for Girls in Norwalk, CT, likely had a more nuanced understanding of her situation than had previous classmates, and perhaps even Aimee herself had when she arrived in 1905. Source: The Lost & Found Story Box. | Lori White Olson | 2 | |||||
Aimee Henry was 16 when her guardian, a cold and disapproving society matron whom she called Aunt Martha, told her the truth about her parents. The revelation had been heartlessly delivered over the winter break of 1907. | Lori White Olson | 3 | |||||
When Mary Martha visited Aimee at University Hospital sometime later, Miss Bell was waiting. She asked the society matron to come into her office — and perhaps hoping to gain favor with the wealthy wife of a trustee — told Martha what Aimee had said. | Lori White Olson | 4 | |||||
Mary Martha, you see, was fiercely protective of her family lineage, reputation, and, most importantly, the generational wealth passed down through the Parker name. So, when Aimee said she thought the two of them might be family — Mary Martha saw it as a personal, social and financial threat. | Lori White Olson | 5 | |||||
In addition to Richard, Mary Martha, and 34-year-old James Parker, the Beacon Street house was also home to an entire staff of servants, including a butler, coachman, housekeeper, cook, and various maids. No census records exist for 1890, but other records indicate Richard Parker's homes usually included seven to nine members of a live-in staff. | Lori White Olson | 6 | |||||
It should have been a moment of overwhelming relief, affirmation, and excitement — she wasn't an orphan or alone in the world. | Lori White Olson | 7 | |||||
There was the scandal of his childhood abduction, the scandal of his mother’s divorce and then marriage to Friedrich Kofler, and, of course, the scandal around the sizable inheritance Allen received from his grandmother, Mary Martha Purnell Thorndike Bourne, at the expense of her living daughters and grandchildren. | Lori White Olson | 8 | |||||
Amelia's story had all the markings of a Shakespearean tragedy: Romeo and Juliet's forbidden love, the tragic death of Cordelia, the hauntings of Hamlet. | Lori White Olson | 9 | |||||
And things had only gotten worse since John’s triumphant return from Europe. | Lori White Olson | 10 | |||||
America had changed a lot in the years since the end of WWI. Soldiers had returned home with more European and open views about sex and relationships, and American women had been given the vote, empowering them in ways big and small. | Chapter 11: The Long Game | Lori White Olson | 11 | ||||
Upon returning to New York, Aimee went before a City Commissioner of Deeds on May 28th, and swore out a deeply personal and detailed statement about her life and experiences with Mary Martha. And she didn’t pull any punches. | Chapter 12: Let the Battle Begin Seeking a Declaratory Judgement | Lori White Olson | 12 | ||||
To that, Aimee's council reminded the courts and William of the law — "No court may deny the rights, the legal rights of a litigation, on the ground that a dangerous precedent may be established.” | Chapter 13: The Court of Public Opinion | Lori White Olson | 13 | ||||
Did they have the authority to grant Aimee's request for a declaratory judgment or not? | Chapter 14: Catch-22 The Wheels of Justice Grind Slow but Grind Fine ~ Sun Tzu | Lori White Olson | 14 | ||||
All outward appearances seemed to suggest that neither the stock market crash, the Great Depression, nor the ongoing lawsuit and associated bad press it had generated had ruffled the society matron's feathers. As often happens, however, appearances were deceiving. | Lori White Olson | 15 | |||||
The issue of generational wealth was already weighing heavily on Mary Martha’s mind. Just a week before the offer had been made, her brother, James, had passed away, and eight months before that, their last remaining Parker cousin, Anna Lowell, had died. Their deaths meant Mary Martha was the only surviving member of her generation – the third generation away from James Parker the Elder. | Lori White Olson | 16 | |||||
As a result, what should have been her sanctuary may have felt like an extension of the emotional prison in which Aimee had spent her whole life—a space dominated and controlled from afar by Mary Martha. | Lori White Olson | 17 | |||||
Even from the grave, Mary Martha was hell-bent on controlling what she saw as hers. | Lori White Olson | 18 | |||||
Sometime in late 1930 – while Harland was contesting the will of Mary Martha’s brother, James, and also negotiating what would become the 1931 Mishou Agreement – he was tapped by former Associate Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals Samuel Seabury to join his investigation into corruption within New York City’s Magistrates’ Courts. | Lori White Olson | 19 | |||||
On November 25, 1945, the Alien Property Custodian brought an action in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to determine how much of the money Mary Martha had assigned to the mysterious Martha Sakrausky through the secret agreement could be seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. | Lori White Olson | 20 | |||||
You may wonder how an Anglo-Irish girl named Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert came to captivate not only a King (who lost everything because of her) but the whole world. The answer is simple: When society told her to act one way, she said no. | The Audacious Life of Lola Montez: The Spider Queen | ||||||
Remembrance Day is observed every year on 11 November, with one minute silence, to give remembrance to the end of the First World War, that ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. | |||||||
