All We Know: Three Lives (2 page)

Esther is without a doubt the most widely read and best informed woman in New York,” wrote a friend of hers in 1927, “and her father’s admiration for her and devotion to her is one of the rarest things to behold…Mrs. Murphy, very patrician with beautiful white hair and many jewels, sits back and smokes her cigarettes without interesting herself very much in her husband’s and her daughter’s very brilliant dialogue.”

Patrick Murphy bullied his sons, Frederic and Gerald, but he was Esther’s champion—“so proud,” in his wife’s words, “that he [could] hardly see straight.” Part of the first group of Irish Catholics to find acceptance in New York society, Murphy raised his children in a muddled combination of privileges deriving from his success and scorn for the fact that they could not repeat his trajectory. Esther, whom he called Tess, was exempt from some of the expectations that haunted her brothers, such as success in business, and she exceeded others, with her scholarly acumen. Still, like her brothers, she grew up steeped in an atmosphere of opportunity and exclusion and in the myth and fact of Patrick Murphy’s professional and social climb.

She also absorbed or inherited some of her mother’s nervousness and depression. Anna Murphy’s letters to her children often report her bad dreams and anxieties. She took “life and the living of it so tragically,” Gerald wrote in 1915. In the late 1950s, more than a quarter of a century after their parents’ deaths, he wrote to Esther: “Mother was devoted, possessive, ambitious, Calvinistic, superstitious, with a faulty sense of the truth. She was hypercritical and as I recall it, ultimately resigned from most of her friendships.” He remembered their father as a man who “avoid[ed]…close relationships including family ones…a solitary [who] managed, though he had a wife and children, to lead a detached life.” Esther adored her father, but as the girl in the family and the youngest child, she found her place was with her mother and spent long stretches of time alone with Anna Murphy, at home and at the watering holes of the wealthy in Europe and the United States. Every once in a while, Patrick Murphy would appear from Paris or London, where he spent half of every year supervising the Mark Cross factories, procuring the fittings of upper-class European life for American consumption, and maintaining a mistress. “Our father who art in Europe,” Gerald would say.

Esther posed with a newspaper (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)

Born in Boston in 1855 or ’56, the eldest of thirteen children, Murphy had gone to work for the saddler Mark W. Cross in the mid-1870s, first as a bookkeeper and then as a salesman. He eventually bought the company, relocated it to fashionable Tremont Street, and transformed it into a purveyor of small leather goods, including bags, cigar cases, tea baskets, gloves, and stationery cases. In 1892 he moved his business and family to Manhattan—the former to a shop on Lower Broadway, opposite City Hall and near the Financial District, the latter to a brownstone on lower Fifth Avenue. He had married Anna Ryan in 1884; Fred and Gerald were born in Boston in 1885 and 1888. Esther was born in New York on October 22, 1897. Murphy weathered the financial panics of 1890 and 1892–93, and in 1902 he opened another Mark Cross shop, at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street. He also had a shop on Regent Street in London and a glove factory in Wiltshire, and he eventually bought the leather factory in central England that produced much of his inventory. Mark Cross still made luggage, equestrian supplies, and writing accessories, but Murphy also brought the thermos, the hot-water bottle, Minton china, English crystal, Scottish golf clubs, the demitasse, the highball glass, and the cocktail set (later subjects of Gerald’s paintings) to market in the United States.

His political life was at least as important to him as his business. He had served in the Massachusetts Legislature as a Democratic representative of Boston’s Twelfth District in 1878–79; in New York he associated with the reforming wing of Tammany Hall and was a friend of Al Smith, the progressive Irish-Catholic governor and 1928 presidential candidate. By the time Esther was a young child, he had also begun to move toward the circles of ruling-class power in Manhattan. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York society “was still a closed circle to which one either did or did not belong,” wrote one critical insider. Religious, racial, and ethnic prejudice went without saying, as did a rigid “social hierarchy, from which all random elements were rigorously excluded.” The Four Hundred, that group of families identified as “Society,” would also “have fled in a body from a poet, a painter, a musician, or a clever Frenchman.” But by the turn of the twentieth century there was room for an anomaly or two, and Patrick Murphy’s controlled wit made him a celebrated speaker at the enormous banquets that were part of the public life of the city’s elite. He made his debut in 1903  at one of its premier rituals, the National Horse Show Association dinner, held in the old Madison Square Garden, where his audience was composed of Astors, Harrimans, Vanderbilts, Schermerhorns, and Hamiltons. He came “to be regarded as the official orator of the…Association” and was in such demand as an after-dinner speaker, to business groups and private clubs, that he spent most of his evenings out.

Bald, clean shaven, meticulously tailored, he would hold himself rigid, clasp his hands behind his back, and speak in a “clear fluent monotone.” His talks were a series of epigrammatic utterances, strung together cleverly and recycled frequently, with just a glancing mention of the group he was addressing. He timed himself ruthlessly. His themes were government, business, history, alcohol, and taxation. (The excise tax on business income and the graduated personal income tax were introduced in 1913.) He cited Macaulay, Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Greeks. The need to pay tribute to a prominent man of the day, often the guest of honor at such occasions, meant that he spent a certain amount of time musing about success and flattering his audiences. “He who breeds thoroughbreds must be a thoroughbred himself” was “an aphorism that elicited the liveliest applause” at the Horse Show banquet of 1904. He was compared to Mark Twain and other entertaining orators of the previous century. His characteristic rhetorical gesture was an ostensibly serious or paradoxical statement followed by a deflating quip. “The art of speaking is to say nothing—briefly,” he observed, more than once. “But the tragedy of it is the less a man has to say the more difficult he finds it to stop.” Paradox and didacticism were also the style of the advertising copy for his firm, which he wrote. “Buying inferior articles to save money is like stopping the clock to save time,” ran one.

Esther’s prolix and imaginative verbal style shared little with her father’s disciplined and formulaic method. Even as a child, she performed constantly, testing her own and others’ authority. On a transatlantic voyage with her parents, age eleven, she initiated a trial on behalf of a passenger after she overheard him complain about his wife’s cigarette smoking, appointing herself prosecutor and choosing a jury. “Before we knew it there were a hundred people around her,” her mother wrote from on board the
Amerika
in June 1909. That summer, at the Beau-Rivage Palace hotel in Lausanne, a pinnacle of prewar leisure, Esther “instigated” a baseball game, corralling the guests into two teams, coaching those who did not know the game, again attracting a crowd. At home in New York, when her elderly nanny took her to Central Park for exercise, Esther would skate off, a gawky girl Pied Piper, pulling a group of children after her and mesmerizing them with terrifying “Edgar Allan Poe–ish” stories.

But if her style was unlike her father’s, she was shaped by his preoccupations and riveted by his political savvy. “History is simply a record of the failures of government,” Patrick Murphy told one audience. And: “History teaches us one thing only, and that is no statesman has ever learned anything from history.” At the Horse Show in 1907, he addressed the financial crisis of the preceding month. “We have had explosive financial fireworks,” he said of Theodore Roosevelt’s attempts to regulate big business, the collapse of confidence in the banking system, the failure of the trust companies, and J. P. Morgan’s rescue of these institutions after negotiations in Morgan’s home with a consortium of bankers.

Esther with the actor John Drew (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)

For Murphy, too, there was no such word. But his success, which stemmed from his accomplishments in business, was seldom attributed to them. He was a well-to-do merchant who catered to wealthy New Yorkers, and he was on the board of directors of at least one bank in the course of his career; yet when his speeches were reported in the newspapers, as they often were, he was not identified as the president of Mark Cross. It was important to him and others that he never “appeared the business man.” In the words of one acquaintance, “He looked like a gentleman and he was a gentleman.” The reporter added: “He always carried a cane and gloves.” Membership in the Manhattan, Pilgrims, and Lambs clubs; a move uptown to West Fifty-seventh Street, then to an enormous apartment at 525 Park Avenue; the purchase of a summer house in Southampton and membership in the Southampton Club (of which Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, was president)—all signaled and facilitated his rise.

And so, as Esther grew up, a number of the “distinguished and remarkable…American women” she knew were members of New York’s elite families. One, Margaret “Daisy” Chanler—broad-minded, kind, and married into the Astor family—was also a sharp analyst of New York society, and her children became Esther’s friends. The travel and political writer Edith O’Shaughnessy—“a clever and ponderous dowager and a great crony of my Ma’s”—was another fixture of Esther’s childhood. But the heroine of Esther’s youth and young adulthood was Edith Wharton. A voracious scholar, largely self-educated, Wharton was at once a serious artist and a commercial success who had also been a pawn in the marriage market. For a bookish young woman who was studying her own awkward social position, Wharton was an inspiration and a caution, and Esther read her closely. In
The House of Mirth
, Wharton’s first major novel, her protagonist’s failure is one of reputation—the old story. But Wharton also exposes exactly what Lily Bart’s fall has to do with money—with her carefully calibrated yet blind accountings of expenditure and indebtedness—and she shows how a social system that offers meager alternatives to selling oneself in marriage is itself a failure. Through Margaret Chanler, Wharton’s closest friend, Esther eventually met Wharton, and she continued to encounter and admire her as an adult.

Patrick Murphy (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)

Despite her father’s delight in her, Esther also grew up with a heightened awareness of her physical and psychological imperfections, just as her brothers had. Fred was diagnosed with mastoiditis and bleeding ulcers as a young man and he had several surgeries when such procedures were extremely dangerous. Gerald suffered from depression, which he called “the Black Service,” and understood himself as having “a defect over which I have only had enough control to scotch it from time to time”—his attraction to men. When he announced his engagement to Sara Wiborg, the daughter of multimillionaire Frank Wiborg, Patrick Murphy castigated him about his poor work ethic and “fail[ure] to grasp the fundamental duty in life, i.e.: self-support,—and financial independence” and told him he “did not deserve to be married.” Esther was an attractive child with long hair and her mother’s wide face, but she did not grow into a beautiful young person; she had no interest in the conventional pastimes of girls of her social class—dancing, clothes, marriage; her enormous height was beyond the pale for a woman at the time; and she had a lazy eye, which heightened the impression of peculiarity. She was conveyed constantly to eye specialists in New York and Europe as a child and had at least one surgery to correct her vision as an adult. It was still ordinary, moreover, for a girl’s scholarship to be seen as freakish and physically destructive. When Esther was eight, a doctor diagnosed her as suffering from “a peculiar form of ‘Hives’” brought on by what he called “intellectual indigestion.”