Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg

then beyond, she reminded me that the river connected Fenwick to Hartford in the north. (I told her I was no stranger to the Connecticut River, as I had spent a great deal of time along its banks even farther north, in Windsor, Vermont, which had been Max Perkins’s summer and ancestral home. She seemed a little surprised—not that I knew her river, but that it extended beyond her territory.) “Republican,” she said as we drove around, “all very Republican.” She was speaking of the Hartford insurance families, her neighbors and summer friends.
    â€œWe were always left of center,” Kate said of her family, thinking how the Hepburn brood must have appeared to the rest of the upper—middle class in Hartford. “I’m sure they considered us extremely eccentric, a tribe of wild Indians.” And with good reason:
    Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn and his wife, Katharine Houghton Hepburn, were unlike any of their peers, and they prided themselves on the differences. While both were active members of their community, they—and their six children—had always stood slightly apart.
    Tom Hepburn came from two Virginia families—the Hepburns and the Powells—both of which had suffered economically during the Civil War. His father was a poor Episcopalian minister, his mother a proper lady who believed women did not get a fair deal in life and that they should obtain proper educations. “He was very good-looking,” Kate said of her father, “and he adored women.” He had been a great athlete at Randolph-Macon College and studied medicine at Johns Hopkins.
    Katharine “Kit” Hepburn was almost two years his senior, the daughter of Caroline Garlinghouse and Alfred Augustus Houghton (pronounced HO-ten, not HOW-ten). She was, in many ways, the woman Tom’s mother might have become, had she been born a generation later. Alfred Houghton grew up in the shadow of his dynamic brother Amory (pronounced AM-ree, with a short “a”), who built the Corning Glass Company. Alfred suffered from depression; and one day, after visiting his brother, without explanation, he put a bullet through his brain—leaving a young wife and three daughters.
    Not long after that, Caroline Houghton, Kit’s mother, learned that she had stomach cancer and that her days were numbered. She knew her wealthy in-laws would see that her girls would never starve, but she did not want them to be subjected to their very reactionary ways. (“ Very Republican,” said Kate.) Their only life-insurance policy, Caroline Houghton hammered into her children’s heads, would be a college education.
    She moved her family to Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where there was a new college, with a wonderful reputation, for Kit and a preparatory school next door for the younger girls. When Caroline Garlinghouse Houghton died at thirty-four, her three children were farmed out to one relative, then another. Although rich Uncle Amory oversaw their finances, Kit stood up to his conservatism and insisted on his paying for her college education—something he considered a worthless enterprise for women. Katharine Houghton graduated from Bryn Mawr College, and her two sisters followed.
    One of the sisters, Edith, went on to Johns Hopkins to study medicine, where she met Tom Hepburn. They became friends and fencing partners. Then he met her older sister, who quickly fell for him and found a teaching job in Baltimore, just to be near him. Without much money between them, they soon married, confident of opportunities for a bright young doctor and his college-educated wife. Over several offers from hospitals in New York, they chose the small, prosperous city of Hartford and moved into a house across the street from the Hartford Hospital. They promptly had two children, a boy named for him and a girl—born May 12, 1907—named for her. Kate.
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