Edie (3 page)

The Sedgwick my father was most impressed by was Minturn Sedgwick, and that for his athletic prowess—he was a Harvard legend. He was on the team that won the Rose Bowl against Oregon. When I was a little boy running around between people’s legs at a cocktail party, I remember my father calling out, “Minturn, show us how you did it”—really terribly interested—and he’d go on, “Minturn, how did you get down there and
crouch
in the line, I mean when you were playing against Princeton, what position did you assume? How did you charge?” . . . and they’d get Minturn down in his football stance at that party, charging up and down among the guests standing there drinking cocktails.

Of course, my father wasn’t above getting some mileage out of the Sedgwicks for his books—the Sedgwick Pie, for example. In
The Late George Apley
there’s an old-maid cousin, a distant family connection named Hattie, who gets buried in the wrong place in the family plot, indeed in what George Apley considers his
own
segment, and there’s quite a lot of correspondence about whether Cousin Hattie shouldn’t be dug up and moved to where she might more properly belong. I don’t know what the Sedgwicks made of this fun at their expense—it didn’t keep Ellery from asking father to those Somerset lunches. But Ellery was a very smart man.

HARRY SEDGWICK
 Ellery was a dominating, difficult, and exciting man, lacking none of that outstanding Sedgwick male quality, charm. He was very different from his older brother, Babbo, who was Edie’s and my grandfather: Babbo the dandy, the scholar, epicurean, lover of beautiful countries—France, Spain, and Greece—beautiful literature, and, last but by no means least, beautiful women. Ellery was the hard-headed, tough businessman. Though his business was literature, he always knew how to get things done, understood the workings of power, and always had his eye on the “bottom line.” Ellery’s second wife, Marjorie, put it very well: “Your grandfather Babbo was the most charming man that ever lived, but your uncle Ellery has more solid virtues.”

Babbo lived until he was ninety-five. He could remember people shouting in the streets of Stockbridge that Abraham Lincoln had been shot. He was especially anxious to outlive his Harvard classmate Godfrey Cabot—known to his Cabot nephews and nieces as Uncle God—who was a teetotaler. Babbo always referred to him as a “disgrace to the class of ’82,” and worried that if Cabot outlived his classmates he would credit abstinence from alcohol as the reason. I remember hearing about a class dinner at which five of them turned up. There they were, these wonderful old Harvard men in their nineties gathering for a reunion supper, and Cabot, who was the secretary of the class, had, of course, ordered no wine. This was more than Babbo could bear. He stood up on a chair and called out, “Champagne!” He reported afterwards that one of his elderly classmates, a man he could not recall having ever met before, looked over and said, “I’m
so
glad you came.”

There was a family rumor that Babbo had been offered the editorship of the
Atlantic
before his younger brother, Ellery. True or not, the
Atlantic
got the right man. Babbo was not a man of affairs, at least of a business nature. He practiced law in New York for nearly fifteen years and gave it up. He wrote about it: “I was mentally and morally uncomfortable, as if I were swimming in glue. I did not understand the law. It seemed to me to create most of the difficulties it professed to settle.”

Life must not have been easy for Babbo then. His courtship of my grandmother was not going well. She had declined his offer of marriage. He said, “I can’t take it any longer.” He bought ammunition, went back to his law offices, wrote farewell letters, and started to load the gun. The ammunition wouldn’t fit. He never knew if the clerk in the gun shop had made a mistake, or whether he thought my grandfather
looked too high-strung and had slipped him the wrong ammunition on purpose.

He kept trying different jobs. He was the headmaster at the Brearley School in New York for a year. The demands of headmastering escaped him completely, and neither he nor the trustees were sorry to see him move on after the year. He wrote almost thirty books—histories and biographies. But his real career was his life: the people, places, and literature that filled it. He closed one of his letters to me, “Squeeze the flask of life to the dregs.”

FAN SEDGWICK
 Babbo was widowed in 1919, and he moved to Cambridge. My father, Minturn, a Harvard undergraduate, went to live with him. Then in 1924 my father married Helen Peabody, the daughter of Endicott Peabody, the founder and headmaster of Groton School, and she invited Babbo to five with them. My mother and Babbo were wonderful company for each other. They had lunch together every day. At dinnertime theirs was
the
conversation—often quite glittering and literate—with Daddy the quiet, benevolent brown bear at the end of the table. He didn’t seem to mind, and we children listened with some wonderment. Babbo and Mummy had a good time and loved to laugh, and we all laughed with them. One exceptional moment was when a conversation drifted (with Babbo’s guidance) into “Free Love.” Mummy’s face froze, and that was the end of
that
conversation. She had a superb sense of humor but her archetypal New England heritage imposed limits. Babbo really loved her. There had been troops of women in his life, but his daughter-in-law held a special place. She came down to Stockbridge from Murray Bay for young Tina Marquand’s wedding not feeling especially well and she died during the night. I’ve heard that Babbo stood at her grave at the Pie and he called out, “Oh, Helen, Helen, it should be I.”

SAPCIE SEDGWICK
 Aunt Helen loved Murray Bay, and so did Babbo. It was the family’s summer place on the St. Lawrence River in Quebec. It was the place where Babbo and my grandmother had always spent their summers. For Babbo it must really have been home. He would say, “I am very eager for another summer in that dear place,” and “Beyond Murray Bay there is only heaven.”

HELEN BURROUGHS STERN
 The first time I went to Murray Bay was with Harry Sedgwick, my new husband. Edie’s first cousin. I was just married—a young farm girl from New Hampshire, thrust suddenly
into this incredible Sedgwick family as a young bride. Perhaps they were as puzzled by me as I was by them. People from Boston used to say, “Where are you from?” And I’d say, “Manchester, New Hampshire,” and they’d say, “Oh, way up north?” as if they thought I came from Alaska.

The Murray Bay house was large, with porches, and an enormous green lawn leading down to the water. The water was just freezing cold. The days were like the water—shining and scintillating. Everything smelled like summer cedar. The house contained the strangest combination: beautiful braided rugs were everywhere, made in the local abbeys up there . . . glowing rooms with satiny walls and lovely lamps . . . and yet the lampshades were bought down at J. C. Penney’s and they had Mickey Mouses on them. Suddenly you found things that were totally tasteless. The Sedgwicks just didn’t care about that sort of thing. I did, passionately. It just killed me. I wanted it
all
to look wonderful.

The picnics, for instance, were
such
a tradition. Someone would announce in the morning, “Now if s the time of year when we must go to the . . .” and off we would go on these expeditions—pilgrimages, really—always to the same place year after year. The wicker picnic baskets had to be brought down. The thermoses had to be filled with syllabub, which was a kind of drink made out of claret and milk. The Sedgwicks would say, “Syllabub is like Claret Cup, only it’s far better.” This was apparently because it had cinnamon in it. Eugene, the Canadian who worked for the Sedgwicks, would launch these two Old Town canoes. I always imagined they had been hewn out of the trees by the Indians. Babbo would somehow get himself down the hI’ll with his two sticks and get into one of them. He wore stockings that came up to his knickerbockers and folded over once, and what he always called his Cinderella slippers. He had a special seat for himself, and the women sat in some sort of raffia wicker seats placed in the bottom of the canoe. The men paddled like mad. I always remember they
feathered
their paddles—Minturn and Harry, my husband—after all, they had been Harvard crew men. Eugene would go ahead of us in the little rowboat to clear the ground where we were to picnic. He was always dressed in a striped waistcoat, a white shirt, a black tie over a celluloid collar.

When we got to the island we’d spread blankets—lap-robes from cars, big plaid blankets from the football games—and the things would be brought off the canoes: the supplies, the thermoses, the syllabub. The food was really marvelous . . . thin sandwiches with cucumbers
in them, and watercress, and almost no mayonnaise and a lot of butter and no crusts. They were cut in half, and each half was carefully and perfectly wrapped in wax paper. Everything was just so. Even the Sedgwick lemonade had to be made in a certain way. But it was all taken for granted. It was that way because it always had been. Always Minturn would make scrambled eggs. It was the tradition—scrambled eggs
Minturn.
He would say: “I am going to make some scrambled eggs . . . I don’t hear many huzzahs.” This was supposed to produce a great cheer.

After the picnic Babbo would always read aloud—usually whatever was interesting him at the moment. P. G. Wodehouse was his absolute favorite, but if he found something in the
Letters of Marcus Aureltus
that really turned him on, he would read
that
to us, and he would say, “This is superbly couched, and you must listen, and you must remember it.” One was never allowed to say “memorize.” I used to say “memorize” and Babbo would correct me. “Commit to memory” was how it was supposed to be said. He would read for about half an hour, and of course it was dark by then and everyone took turns holding the
torch,
my dear, not a flashlight, so that Babbo could see the pages. And that was quite a privilege, right?

Tradition, that was all the Sedgwicks thought about. They were so involved with the past that the present was not realseeming. If you could couch some phrase in a way that harked back to Herodotus, then they loved you . . . because they loved history. They would spend hours talking about Cromwell, but as if he were their uncle! The best, dearest relative!

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 Babbo, being a gentle scholarly person and a widower without a bean, was totally dependent upon his sons to support him—a most undignified position for a heavenly old gentleman. When he wasn’t with the children he lived terribly frugally. A friend of the family described staying with him when he was a widower in Cambridge and getting nothing to eat but boiled eggs. Obviously he preferred to stay with his sons, and it was while he was staying with our family on the ranch near Santa Barbara that he fell in love with Gabriella Ladd. My parents introduced them. She was staying nearby with friends of theirs and they invited her to come riding. Later she told me mat my father made a pass at her that first day, and she was horrified.

Gabriella was in her early forties then, never married, and Babbo was almost ninety. Her father was quite a well-known Boston pediatrician;
her mother was a sculptress. Gabriella had been a champion high jumper at Vassar. At one point she decided to be a nun, and she might even have embarked on this course but when she met Babbo, they fell in love that first night. In the middle of dinner, Babbo was quoting some Greek verse—I think it was Anacreon—and when he hesitated over a line, Gabriella picked up where he left off and completed the passage—in Greek. She had the most musical voice—Babbo’s heart must have turned right over. Their courtship lasted five years, during which they wrote each other every day, sometimes several letters a day. I came across one of his recently which began, “I have a new name for you, it is Great Heart.”

MINTURN SEDGWICK
 Babbo made no bones about the fact that he was in love with Gabriella, but he said, “It’s ridiculous at my age getting married. We have this perfect relationship, and why spoil it?” But the lady had other ideas. She was determined. In Bermuda in the spring of ’53 she wrote Babbo saying that there was a very attractive young man she was considering marrying. It worked. He flew to Bermuda, and within a day or two we had a cable saying,
ALL IS WELL, SHE ACCEPTS.

HELEN BURROUGHS STERN
 I was in love with the idea of the two of them marrying. Babbo! I was infatuated with him. What was remarkable about him was what a romantic he was—especially for an older person. He called me “the barefoot angel,” and he always had strawberries on the breakfast table when I came down. He was an absolute fiend about how English should be spoken. He did not wear a tie; he wore a
cravat.
It was “knickerbockers,” not “knickers,” and he wore them, too, with long woolen socks. Once I said something was exquisite, and he said, “How vile! I can’t believe that’s my grand-daughter-in-law
speaking!
” He said, “Exquisite doesn’t exist.
Exquisite
or nothing I” He had his way. At his wedding to Gabriella he came down the aisle alone, walking along with his two canes, wearing a lily of the valley in his buttonhole, a soft white shirt, a rose-pink cravat, and shiny shoes—I think he had the same pair of shoes for about thirty-five years and he shined them every day: they were what old leather was meant to look like, mellow, you know, mellow things’ encasing what he always referred to as his Cinderella feet, though they were
enormous
—and in this ensemble he came down the aisle with the music blaring, and your heart just melted at the sight of this old, old man moving down the aisle alone, with his two canes, toward his bride, who was waiting at the altar in an unusual reversal of the normal procedure—quite a show I As the vows were being said, the minister, who was a spry young thing of about sixty-five, asked the bride and groom to repeat after him, “Thereto I plight thee my troth.” He pronounced it “trawth,” whereupon Babbo in a loud and insistent voice, projecting it in this way he had, boomed forth:
“Troth,
young man!
Troth!
” He banged his stick, brandishing the other, and then banged
it
down. He meant business! At the wedding dinner afterwards he got up to offer some toasts, but he wouldn’t allow anyone to stand up to join in them. He would not permit it. He said, “You only stand to drink someone’s health if they’re dead. It’s only for the dead that you rise. You must
sit
to the living.” He yelled: “Sit down! Sit down!” in this quite frantic way while guests sort of half stood up, glasses half raised, everyone looking at each other quite dazed. He kept banging his spoon on the table and insisting: “Sit
down!
” He must have been a fiend when he was younger. Can you imagine? Gabriella was not one to be overshadowed by anyone, but that was Babbo’s day.