“Shadows forever undispelled”

Paul Moses alleged that his brother Robert had cut him out of part of his inheritance and kept him out of city positions for which he was, as an engineer, eminently qualified. From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

The truth of Paul Moses’ charge about the inheritance will never be determined. His mother, who left it, is, of course, dead, and so, to the last man or woman, are all but one of her friends and relatives who might be in a position to verify or deny his story. The single exception, of course, is his brother. Robert Moses refuses — and has refused for forty years — to allow the subject of his mother’s will (a will, signed on her deathbed in his presence, that invalidated an earlier will that Paul says divided her estate equally among the two brothers and their sister, Edna) to be raised in his presence. The truth of Paul’s charge is, moreover, clouded further by the personality of the man who made it and by the shadows which surround certain periods of his life. Paul could have dispelled those shadows. For months, the author asked him to do so. He refused, saying it was no one’s business but his own. Finally, he said he would, at their next interview. On the day before that interview, he was stricken with his final illness. From the hospital, he telephoned the author and began the story. Before he could get more than a few sentences into it, he collapsed. Several days later, he died, leaving the shadows forever undispelled.

The charge that Robert Moses kept his brother out of city positions, Caro says, is true.

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