Malcolm was convinced it was a good plan, but Carolyn wasn’t so certain. She had visited Sherman’s estate over the years and knew it was isolated, thirty minutes’ drive from the nearest train station and across a causeway that made you feel as if you were leaving the rest of the world behind. She was worried she would miss the city. She loved their apartment at the Manhattan House. To her it didn’t seem cramped; it felt cozy. After six years of motherhood, she had settled into a happy routine with the children and their nanny, relying on their schedules for the quiet rhythm and predictability of her days. In the city, she had everything she needed. There was Central Park close by, Bloomingdale’s, the ballet, her friends, all within a few blocks. Malcolm reassured her that she could go into Manhattan whenever she liked. It was only a train ride away; she could have the best of both worlds! Besides, he had already picked out an architect, Randall Cox, well known in the South and an up-and-comer on the East Coast. Together, the two men had started drawing up the plans.
Cox’s vision for the new house was a modern, barn-shaped building constructed from redwood and glass, very much in the contemporary style. The main living area would be expansive, with a lofted ceiling two and a half stories high and glass picture windows opening out onto the views of the Sound. Carolyn worried that with all that space and glass right on the water’s edge, the house was going to feel cold, especially in winter. If they were going to move out of the city, she was hoping for something homier, more like a cottage, a place where she could be comfortable with the children, somewhere like Steubenville, where neighbors lived close by and watched out for one another. Carolyn’s roots were simple. Malcolm felt that she was missing the point. Sherman’s estate was on Long Island’s Gold Coast, where millionaires came to spend their summers. Besides Sherman’s castle, there was the Colgate estate, the Marshall Field estate, the Wood estate, vast mansions built on acres of manicured land. The Reybolds were going to have to find their own way to keep up with the neighbors. They needed to build a show house, a statement of good taste, a place where you could invite people for parties. For Carolyn, though, the neighbors were part of the problem. Whenever she went to out to visit Sherman on Long Island, she was reminded yet again that she was an outsider, the imposter from Steubenville.
But Malcolm was determined, and it became harder and harder for Carolyn to resist getting swept up in his enthusiasm and plans. She was happy for him that he seemed so excited about the project. Perhaps if they moved to Long Island, it would be a new start, a chance for them to be closer as a couple. Perhaps Long Island would be good for their marriage.
So in the summer of 1958, Carolyn began packing up the apartment at the Manhattan House. As she filled boxes with their belongings, her thoughts turned to Grace, who had helped them find the apartment in the first place. It seemed like yesterday that Grace had boxed up her own life to leave Manhattan and move to Monaco. Two years later, so much had happened. Grace had given birth to a daughter, Caroline, and then a son, Albert. Little Caroline had been named for a relative of Prince Rainier’s but with a nod to Grace’s old friend, and Carolyn had been deeply touched by the gesture. She missed her friend. They had seen each other only twice since Grace’s departure, when Grace came to back to visit New York en route to see her family in Philadelphia. In between, they wrote to each other.
Now Carolyn wrote Grace to tell her that they were moving, out to Long Island, to Rose Cottage, a guesthouse on the Colgate estate, not far from their plot of land so they could more easily supervise the building of the Dream House. It wasn’t as if Carolyn needed to come into the city for work anymore. Since Grace’s wedding, she had worked only four modeling jobs, and Eileen Ford had removed her name from the agency’s books. Now that she had turned thirty, she could no longer pass for a teenager; she knew that her career was over. As much as she missed modeling, Carolyn’s focus now was getting the family settled out on Long Island, and helping the girls get adjusted to their new elementary school when they started in the fall. Malcolm was absorbed in supervising the work on the new house, which he hoped would be ready within the year. The move to Long Island was going to be a fresh start.
Then, in the spring of 1959, Carolyn wrote to Grace with good news. She was pregnant again, due in November. That summer at Rose Cottage, Carolyn began to feel the first stirrings of the baby inside her. Work on the Dream House was progressing well, and before Jill and Robin went back to school in September, the family finally moved in, unpacking their boxes. The girls spent the final days of vacation roaming on the beach and
