Edith Taft

Edith Taft, Rabo Karabekian’s second wife, is the family heir who turns a grand inherited house into a setting for modern art and shared life. Their twenty-year marriage joins her East Hampton home to his collection; her decision to renovate and exhibit the paintings gives them a place in the house and, eventually, in a public museum tour. Her death leaves Rabo with the property, the art, and a home whose spaciousness only makes his isolation more visible.

Identity and Background

Edith was a grandniece of William Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh president of the United States and tenth chief justice of the Supreme Court. Her first husband was Richard Fairbanks, Jr., a Cincinnati sportsman and investment banker descended from Charles Warren Fairbanks, senator from Indiana and vice-president under Theodore Roosevelt. Edith had no children in that marriage and was past childbearing when she married Rabo, making their household a deliberately small family rather than an extension of hers through children.

Her inheritance was a nineteen-room waterfront house in East Hampton, Long Island, held by her Anglo-Saxon family for three generations. Its estate included two tennis courts, a swimming pool, a carriage house, a potato barn, and three hundred yards of private beach on the Atlantic. Rabo jokes that the house’s former owners might object to its passing to a man with his Armenian name, but the joke also registers the change of ownership: Edith’s family property becomes the home of a husband whose name and history sit outside its inherited lineage.

Marriage and Shared Home

Rabo first met Edith and Richard when he persuaded them to rent him their unused potato barn as a studio. They had acquired the land from a neighboring farmer to prevent development, and the barn came with it. The arrangement began as a practical connection to Rabo’s work; intimacy came later, after Richard died and Rabo’s first wife, Dorothy, left with their two sons, Terry and Henri. Rabo sold the family house in Springs and made the barn both his studio and his home.

Edith and Rabo were happily married for twenty years. For Rabo, she was not simply the owner of an imposing house but the person who made a home within it. The estate’s many buildings and amenities set against the couple’s small household underscore a contrast that persists after her death: the house is ample enough for a large family, while the life they build there remains intimate and limited. Edith had no children with Rabo, and his sons did not become regular members of this household.

Renovation and the Art Collection

Edith was the creative mind behind the house’s transformation. When Rabo moved from the potato barn into her old-fashioned family home, she asked whether he was comfortable there. He said that he loved it as it was and did not want her to change anything for him. She nevertheless recognized a possibility in its rooms that he had not proposed: she summoned contractors, stripped wallpaper to bare plaster, removed chandeliers, installed track lighting, and painted the walls, trim, doors, and window sashes oyster white.

The renovation was not an attempt to erase the house’s past so much as a way to make its inherited architecture serve a new purpose. The February 1981 issue of Architect & Decorator featured the foyer on its cover and praised the entrance hall as nearly a small museum collection, a prelude to the art in the rooms beyond. Rabo explicitly credits Edith, not himself, with conceiving this marriage of an old family house and modern art. Once the work was finished, she said that she had nearly gone to her grave without realizing her gift for remodeling and decorating.

Edith then directed Rabo to call Home Sweet Home Moving and Storage, where he had kept his paintings for years. Her invitation to the paintings to come home converted the renovation from a domestic makeover into a change in the collection’s life: works once hidden in storage entered the house’s rooms and became visible to visitors. In a story where paintings are repeatedly judged by their meaning, price, and material survival, Edith’s contribution is concrete and curatorial. She makes a domestic space capable of presenting them, even though Rabo remains the one who answers visitors’ questions about what they mean.

Collection, Visitors, and Public Display

After Edith’s death, Rabo describes the house as sheltering the most important private collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings still in private hands. Visitors come to ask what the pictures are supposed to mean, and he answers as a museum guard might. The role is both a consequence of Edith’s decision to bring the art into the house and a sign of how fully that decision altered its function: the home is now also a place of display, with Rabo positioned as its custodian and interpreter.

The collection’s value complicates its status as a private inheritance. Rabo says it was his property before he married Edith and was worth at least as much as the real estate, stocks, and bonds she left him, including a quarter-share in the Cincinnati Bengals. When Circe Berman is living in the house, she sees respected visitors from Switzerland and Japan treat the paintings almost as gods; she is also present when Rabo sells a Mark Rothko directly off the wall to a Getty Museum representative for $1.5 million. Her contempt for the collection’s claims to meaning contrasts with its enormous market value. Edith’s house thus holds art that is at once domestic possession, museum-like display, and commodity.

After Rabo opens the potato barn’s sliding doors to improve the visitor flow, the collection becomes part of a regular museum tour. Visitors pass first through the foyer, with its pictures of girls on swings, then the early Abstract Expressionist works, and finally the immense painting in the barn. The tour’s route makes the house and barn a connected exhibition rather than separate private spaces. Edith’s earlier act of bringing the paintings home supplies the spatial foundation for this later public arrangement, even though she does not live to see it.

Death and Narrative Significance

Edith died two years before the point at which Rabo recounts his life. Her death is followed by the departure of the household’s servants, who say the house has become too lonely; Rabo hires replacements at great expense, but their presence cannot restore its earlier life. The contrast between its nineteen rooms and the diminished company inside them turns the estate from a sign of inheritance into a measure of absence. Rabo describes himself as little more than a museum guard in a home that is also a museum.

Edith’s importance is therefore registered less through a narrated final scene than through the structures and choices she leaves behind: the house, the renovated foyer, the paintings brought out of storage, and the route by which visitors encounter the collection. She is an inheritor, wife, and accomplished decorator whose practical decisions reshape Rabo’s artistic world without making her merely its backdrop. The collection’s later fame and the crowds moving through the barn extend the consequences of her domestic vision, while Rabo’s loneliness after her death marks the limit of what an exhibition, however grand, can replace.