Separating History and Fiction

ON July 15, 1934, in a neat Dutch Colonial in Newton, Massachusetts, Charles Sargent Dixwell succumbed to throat cancer. He was sixty-six. He left a considerable estate of $78,000, much of it still held in a trust his father had established for him at his birth. He had used the money to live the life of a nomadic gentleman, first with a much older wife, then with a much younger mistress who bore him two children. He earned a degree at Vienna Medical College but never practiced. He spoke six languages, lived for fifteen years in Paris, collected jewels for Cartier, and spent “much time in the desert with Lawrence of Arabia.” Being a Dixwell should have made him a New England Yankee through and through. His father’s surname and a middle name from his mother should have opened doors all over the Boston world of banking, seafaring, and power-brokering. But the name he answered to in childhood was Teen Seng, and his mother’s name was Hu Ts’ai-shun. She did not live on Beacon Hill but in China, where Charles’s father, Boston-bred George Dixwell, had been the “opium specialist” for the Heard Company. George purchased opium in India to sell for silver in China, and like many American businessmen who pursued profit in the drug trade, he eventually took a Chinese wife to allay the loneliness of his posting. She bore him a son, but when George brought him back to Boston to teach him the ways of a Yankee gentleman, the boy did not carry the Dixwell surname, because George’s Boston brothers had insisted that he keep the marriage and offspring secret.