On the Bright Side

Go Ask Alice. What is the bright side to a life that was lived from rags to riches to a life sentence at an asylum? Finding someone 100 years later to reclaim your story and reimagine the T he idea struck me during a tour of Flagler’s Whitehall Museum in Palm Beach. Whitehall was a wedding gift from Henry Flagler to his third wife, Mary Lily Kenan, after his second wife, Ida Alice Shourds, was institutionalized in 1895. Gilded Age buffs know that the reason the Standard Oil magnate came to Florida in the first place was due to the poor respiratory health of his first wife, Mary Harkness. And that Whitehall was a gift to his young new bride, Mary Lily Kenan. But little is known about his second wife, Alice, the wife between the two Marys. The docent led us up the staircase of the Grand Hall to the second-floor exhibits, informing us that “after the death of his beloved first wife, and having to put his second wife in a sanatorium, he finally found love again in Mary Lily… this is the La...