What Remains

Are you still to the manor born if the manor is lost?

Pitreavie Castle, once owned by my mother’s ancestors, the Wardlaws of Fife, Scotland.

Growing up, I often heard my southern-born mother lament, with a tacit tsk-tsk, about people who were not “to the manor born.” At least, that’s the way I heard it. The original saying is “to the manner born,” as first uttered by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and refers to someone with an innate ability of any kind.

Whether my mother meant “manor” or “manner,” she was certainly passing judgment on those who demonstrated her lack of “fine breeding.” Those philistines of whom she spoke had metaphorically strayed far from the manor, and their crass behavior sullied the rest of us!

My mother’s insistence that our family was to the manor born puzzled me because, while we traveled, and toured museums, and listened to the classical music radio station, and my sister and I both graduated from the same fancy private school, we absolutely did not live in a manor. We rented a modest Cape Cod-style house in a snooty northeastern town that, at the time, boasted the highest income per capita in the U.S. Most of my classmates resided in historic homes that might as well have been manors, with their columns and grand common rooms and bedroom fireplaces and front and back staircases.

So I often asked myself: if you’ve lost the manor, are you still to the manor born?

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My mother’s maiden name was Wardlaw, and her people immigrated to South Carolina from Scotland some generations back. Her ancestors were royalty-adjacent, literally. According to The Cousin, who has bound books and genealogical records tracing the Wardlaws back to the 1300’s:

“The Scotland records were so well-preserved because of proximity to the Scottish royal family. Bishop Wardlaw was a tutor to the King of Scotland and founded St. Andrews University, his brother’s descendants built Pitreavie Castle on land they bought from the sister of Robert the Bruce, and the Wardlaw burial vault was gifted to the family by the King and Queen.”

The Wardlaws’ luck changed during the invasion of Scotland. Perhaps because they were too refined to fight, they refused to allow 800 rugged Highlanders sanctuary in their Castle during a battle. Legend has it that the Highlanders retaliated by putting a curse on the family, who eventually lost possession of their home and their land.

Sometime between the invasion of Scotland and the American Civil War, the Wardlaws sought a new life in South Carolina. The Cousin is also in possession of a book of letters written by my mother’s grandfather, Andrew Bowie Wardlaw, who detailed his financial hardships after the Civil War. His son, my mother’s father, left his banking career to become a Presbyterian minister, a decision that brought him closer to God but further from financial security. The family moved from one South Carolina town to the next during the Depression, wherever preaching jobs could be found.

Apparently the Wardlaws couldn’t shake off the Highlanders’ curse.

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Somehow my mother’s parents scraped up enough cash to purchase a family cabin in woodsy Montreat, North Carolina, where they went to escape South Carolina’s humid summers. My mother and her brother and sister inherited the cabin, and my family summered there during the first few years of my life. It was during those years that I was introduced to Asheville, the “big city” — then less than 25,000 people — 20 minutes away. My mother and her siblings sold the cabin during the ‘60s. It still stands, just two houses up from my cousins’ home, where I will be staying for awhile after I leave Los Angeles.

The old Wardlaw cabin in Montreat, NC.

Part of the reason I’m moving to Asheville is to own an affordable home. Renting is not a safe option as you approach the fixed-income stage of your life, and are subject to the whims of a landlord’s rent hikes. I’ve said goodbye to three beloved homes in Los Angeles during and post-divorce. Once you’re out of the housing market in this city, it’s very difficult to get back in. Here, you might be able to snag a bare-bones starter home you wouldn’t want to live in for a cool million, but probably closer to a million and a half.

Once a regional secret, Asheville has become a second-home and retirement destination. Many houses go for cash, over-asking, although prices dropped a bit after the Fed hiked up mortgage interest rates. But you can still get 3x the house in Asheville as you can in L.A., so I believe I have a shot at owning one again. All I really need is 1000 square feet and a porch where I can relax in a rocking chair, nursing a cool drink and waving to passersby as the sun melts into a pale blue haze over the mountain ridges.

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Always one to “rise above it,” my mother held onto the Wardlaw values of education, culture, and class, even after her family lost most of their tangible assets. My Wardlaw relatives tend to be a writerly, scholarly, and musical bunch, possessed of “high morals” (another one of my mother’s idioms), meaning they also value honesty and integrity — two qualities which are in diminishing supply these days.

When my birthmother was pregnant with me, the maternity home administrators read her letters from prospective adoptive parents. It was unusual for a birthmother to be allowed to choose the next parents of her own child in those days, but they must have thought highly of her, because they let her. She tells me that most of the letters smacked of a marketing pitch, but something in the way my mother wrote “rang a bell.” Diane doesn’t remember the content of the letter, only the essence of honesty and integrity that permeated it.

Like my mother Mag, Diane taught private schoolchildren for many years, and is a fine writer. I wonder, if not for my DNA, would I have grown up to love books and record thoughts the way my adoptive family did? I imagine that my birthmother wanted to place me in a family that shared her own values, thereby keeping herself alive in me even after I was lost.

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I regret to admit I tuned my mother out a lot. She was a Talker, and I kept my multitude of thoughts to myself, in part because I felt that my incessant psyche-plumbing and contemplative nature made my family uncomfortable.

I didn’t know then that it was my southern Italian DNA that tinged my skin olive and my eyes golden-brown. I just knew, from looking in the mirror, that I did not share my fair-skinned mother’s Scottish heritage. How could I be to the manor born, if the manor was never mine in the first place?

If you met my mother in passing, you would have believed her to be supremely confident, larger than life. She often corrected the grammar of people she didn’t know — supermarket cashiers were a favorite target — who would cock their heads and grimace while I cringed, silently mouthing, “I’m sorry!” Mom favored chunky belts and capes, and in the wintertime sported a fur hat shaped like a giant fez, ensuring that she stood out in a crowd. My self-conscious tween self wished my mom could be like the preppy, tennis-playing mothers of my friends so I could fit in more, but now that I’ve matured, I appreciate the woman that she was.

That woman also sequestered herself in her highback chair next to the bookshelf, self-soothing in the sanctity of ritual: reading the Bible, pencilling in squares of the NYT Sunday crossword, poring over ancestry records. I felt the gap between the part of her that “rose above it” and the part of her that was traumatized. With her family’s assets long gone, she couldn’t teach us anything about wealth creation, but she did instill in my sister and me a certain “manner” that belongs to those of “the manor born.”

In the last years of her life, she and my dad bought a home in Asheville, where they moved after retirement. They paid $75,000 cash in the late ‘80s for a mid-century house in the Grove Park Inn neighborhood, a section of Asheville where those “to the manor born” reside. That home got sold several years later, traded for her new life in an assisted living facility. Sometimes I choke down a sob when I consider the equity, and the history, we lost. But then, the Wardlaws were not known for holding onto property.

Pitreavie Castle, the Wardlaws’ former home in Scotland, still remains, and has been converted into luxury apartments. If you’re bucks-up and fantasize about fleeing America (who isn’t these days?) for the Scottish Highlands, you might want to check out the real estate there.

As for me, I’ll be shopping for a more reasonably priced “manor” in Western North Carolina.

Gazing out my cousins’ window in Montreat.