Rabo Karabekian and Edith Taft

Rabo Karabekian and Edith Taft are partners in a marriage that joins private affection to the fate of a major art collection: Edith gives Rabo not only a home but the vision and labor that turn her inherited house into a setting for modern art. Their relationship develops from the renting of a potato barn into twenty years of marriage, and its aftermath is measured by what remains when Edith is gone—the house, the collection, and a widower who can still describe her work but cannot recover the life she brought to it.

Identity and Background

Edith is introduced through the large, old family house on the waterfront at East Hampton, Long Island, which she leaves to Rabo when she dies. The nineteen-room property had belonged to her Anglo-Saxon family, originally from Cincinnati, for three generations. Its inheritance carries a contrast the narrator recognizes: the house has passed to a husband with an Armenian name, while Rabo jokes that any ancestor who objects should blame the Statue of Liberty. Edith’s family background is also socially prominent. She is a grandniece of William Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh president and tenth chief justice of the United States, and before marrying Rabo she was the widow of Richard Fairbanks, Jr., a Cincinnati sportsman and investment banker.

Rabo and Edith’s connection begins before Richard’s death, through a practical arrangement involving the property. Rabo persuades Edith and her husband to rent him their unused potato barn as a studio. The land had been bought from a neighboring farmer to prevent development, not to continue farming, and the barn came with it. The arrangement first brings Rabo into Edith’s orbit as an artist using an outbuilding on her property; it does not yet make them close. Their personal relationship deepens only after Richard dies and Rabo’s first wife, Dorothy, and their two sons, Terry and Henri, leave him. Rabo sells the family house in Springs and makes Edith’s barn both his studio and his home.

Marriage and Shared Home

Edith and Rabo are happily married for twenty years. She has no children from her first marriage and is past childbearing when she becomes Mrs. Rabo Karabekian. The couple form a very small household inside an exceptionally large estate: the house has two tennis courts, a swimming pool, a carriage house, a potato barn, and three hundred yards of private beach on the Atlantic. The scale of the property makes the intimacy of their marriage more striking, while the barn preserves the place where their relationship began and where Rabo’s work had first been housed.

Edith’s role in the household is neither ornamental nor confined to inherited privilege. Rabo describes her as a many-sided, nurturing presence who brings love, merriment, and active domestic care into the Victorian house. She cooks alongside the cook, gardens with the gardener, does the food shopping, feeds the pets and birds, and befriends wild rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons. Their life also includes frequent parties and visitors, many of them Edith’s friends and relatives, who sometimes stay for weeks. In retrospect, the house’s liveliness appears inseparable from Edith’s daily acts of care: she makes a large family property feel inhabited rather than merely owned.

Art, House, and Public Display

Edith’s most consequential creative contribution to their shared life is her decision to remake the house around Rabo’s Abstract Expressionist collection. The paintings had been stored for years in a warehouse, and Rabo had not assumed that the house should be changed for his sake. He tells Edith he loves its old-fashioned character and that she should not alter anything for him. Edith nevertheless recognizes that the rooms can be redesigned to accommodate the art. She calls in contractors, strips the wallpaper to bare plaster, removes chandeliers, installs track lighting, and has the oak trim, doors, baseboards, window sashes, and walls painted oyster-white.

The change is not simply a decorative backdrop. The renovated foyer brings particular works into a carefully arranged encounter: Terry Kitchen’s painting “Secret Window” faces the entrance, while a Matisse of a woman holding a black cat before a brick wall covered with yellow roses and a Hans Hofmann acquired through Terry Kitchen’s trade with Philip Guston complete the display. The Matisse had been Edith’s fifth-anniversary present to Rabo; the Hofmann had come to Rabo after he paid for a replacement transmission for Terry Kitchen’s Buick. Art in the foyer therefore records several kinds of relationship at once—Edith’s gift, Rabo’s friendships, and the practical exchanges through which works entered his collection.

A 1981 article in Architect & Decorator presents the entrance hall as the nucleus of a small museum and the opening to a larger arrangement of modern art in the house. Rabo makes clear that the achievement belongs to Edith, not to him: she conceived the marriage of the Victorian interior and the paintings, and she was the one who brought the collection out of storage. After the remodeling, she says that she had nearly gone to her grave without discovering her gift for decorating. She then tells Rabo to contact the storage company and imagines the paintings being brought into daylight and welcomed home. The scene makes her act both curatorial and domestic: the collection becomes visible because Edith has found a way for it to live in the house.

Loss and the Afterlife of the Marriage

After Edith’s death, the difference between the house she animated and the house Rabo inhabits becomes a measure of his bereavement. The servants who had lived there while Edith was alive leave soon after she dies, saying that the place has become too lonely. Rabo hires replacements at considerable expense, but the altered household no longer restores the earlier sense of home. The large estate survives as property and as a repository for art; the companionship that had made it a family setting does not.

Edith is buried in Green River Cemetery, where Rabo expects to be buried as well, only a few yards from the graves of Jackson Pollock and Terry Kitchen. The stated proximity places the marriage’s ending in a landscape shared with figures central to Rabo’s artistic life. Edith’s death is not treated as the disappearance of her influence: the foyer she designed, the paintings she helped bring into view, and the house she left him continue to shape how he lives. But their persistence also throws her absence into relief. In the present, Rabo is treated by some of the household’s younger occupants as if he were a forgotten veteran guarding a museum, and he accepts that the description fits the public role he has left himself.

The paintings that Edith helped install had been Rabo’s property before their marriage, and their value is substantial enough to rival the real estate, securities, and other assets she leaves him. Their later public significance is therefore not evidence that Rabo married for wealth: he emphasizes that the collection was already his. At the same time, the marriage gives the collection a domestic setting and an audience. Visitors come to the house to look at the works and ask what they mean; Rabo answers as best he can, while the rooms continue to exhibit Edith’s choices about how they should be seen.

Significance of the Relationship

The marriage binds affection to work without making the two interchangeable. Rabo’s art supplies the objects around which much of the house’s later public life is organized, but Edith supplies the active vision that converts stored paintings into a coherent domestic display. Her labor includes cooking, gardening, entertaining, remodeling, and arranging; it is practical and creative at once. The contrast between Rabo’s description of her as a force of love and merriment and his later identity as a lonely museum guard shows how thoroughly her ordinary labor had sustained the home.

Their shared history also complicates the distinction between private collection and public institution. Edith’s house is still a family inheritance, but her renovation makes its rooms legible as exhibition space; after her death, visitors encounter the art there and Rabo assumes the task of answering their questions. Her choices thus continue to govern the collection’s presentation even when she can no longer guide the visitors herself. Their relationship matters not merely because Edith leaves Rabo a house, but because she makes that house a place where his art can be seen—and because the posthumous survival of that arrangement cannot replace the person who made it a home.