Everybody Was So Young (12 page)

At the end of January they came “home to 11th Street,” where the view, literally and metaphorically, was somewhat different from what they had been used to. The street itself looked away from Fifth Avenue, and toward Sixth, where quaint brick storefronts faced one another under the tracks of the rather noisy and dirty elevated train. At the end of the block, near Sixth, was the tiny triangular cemetery of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, whose congregation had moved on but had left its stone memorial tablets and a tree-shaded brick walk behind. Around the corner, at 51–55 West 10th Street, was the Studio Building, a six-story edifice designed by the architect Richard Morris Hunt specifically to house the studios of such artists as J. F. Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederick Church, all of whom had leased space there in their heyday. Although that day was long past, the Studio Building was still home to less-renowned artists and illustrators.

Number 50 West 11th—one of a group of identical brick row houses on the south side of the street with pilastered front doors and scrolled wrought-iron stoops—had been built in the mid-nineteenth century for residents who were middle-class rather than wealthy; there were grander residences up the street, not to mention the mansions of Fifth Avenue or Washington Square, just blocks away. Although the house was four stories high, the ground floor, given over to kitchen and utility rooms, was several steps below street level, and the top story—with rooms for Rose, the cook, and Mollie, the maid—had squat little half-height windows, with ceilings to match. As a result Number 50, and the houses adjacent to it, had a cottagey look.

The interiors were cottage-scale as well. In the Murphys’ house the single sitting room faced the street, and behind that was a dining room with a little breakfast room opening off it that overlooked the tiny rear garden. On the floor above were just two bedrooms, only one of which had a bathroom; and instead of the steam heat boasted by any self-respecting modern residence, all the rooms had fireplaces. But despite its modest proportions and lack of modern conveniences, Number 50 became the first of a series of legendary Murphy houses, an artful composition that expressed not just its owners’ taste, but also their attitudes about life.

Gerald had had the house’s brick facade freshly whitewashed in the autumn, and the gray patterned wallpaper that he and Sara had chosen was hung in the hall; the wide-plank floors were covered with hooked rugs that Sara had pilfered from the Dunes. If some of these details could have been lifted from the pages of Elsie De Wolfe’s recent best seller, The House in Good Taste, the rest were highly individual. Instead of the highly carved Herter or Belter settees their parents might have craved, or the pastel French bergeres Miss De Wolfe recommended, Gerald and Sara filled their rooms with carefully placed early nineteenth-century American and English pieces—squat, stubby chairs and sofas, Empire chests, and Sheraton benches—and brightened them with fresh flowers in Empire vases and old opalescent glass jugs. On the walls they hung tinsel pictures on glass, old gilt mirrors, and folk art paintings. A particular favorite of Gerald’s depicted “a black and white guinea pig making every effort to appear indifferent to . . . an idealized bunch of grapes.” Most of these finds had come from secondhand shops and more than a few were refinished or retouched by Gerald and Sara themselves. The result was a house that updated “Old Worldy” virtues with fresh paint, and combined traditional elements in new and surprising ways. The look they were after—eccentric, elegant, original—was emphatically not a fashion statement: it was the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual neoclassicism they both yearned for. Gerald had once tried to articulate it in a letter to Sara describing a friend’s house in Roslyn, New York:

It’s very old—wide corridors, bedrooms with ball-room dimensions, aged furniture, the grains and knots of the wood of which are outlined with deep cracks, the brocades on the chairs are worn nearly thro’; but have not been replaced. On my writing-desk is an elaborate silver stand containing ink and a shaker full of powdered sand! . . .. To the modern it would all appear as “shabby genteel”—but these people love their worn rugs and cracked teacups. You and I prefer “shabby genteel” to its inverse i.e. “smart chintzed apartments” with their skillful imitation hyacinths in painted pots,—and general air of having been inspired by Vogue’s latest hints to the housekeeper.

“Smart apt,” in fact, became a private term of opprobrium, used to dismiss anything that smelled of the chichi. “A bit too smart apt,” they would say to each other, with a barely perceptible arch of the eyebrows.

Gerald went back to work at Mark Cross, leaving his cozy nineteenth-century nest every morning to mope in the sterile modern surroundings of his Fifth Avenue office, where Sara would send him little notes during the course of the day which said no more than “how much and how dearly I love you.” At this point, when they were at last together, separation of any kind was wrenching. A short summer visit by Gerald to his Yale friend Arthur Howe was so unnerving that Gerald had to comfort himself by going to an antique store and purchasing “2 blue vases for your room, a glass bottle of an indescribable colour, a lamp with a lyre base and two painted globes you’ll love, 3 white glass goblets, 2 monstrous bird pictures done in feathers, etc.” As he wrote Sara then, “You were beside me at every step, and I felt so near you that I dreaded going out into the street.”

She was spending the summer with her family at the Dunes (the shackles of daughterhood proving rather hard to shake off), and Gerald was commuting to East Hampton on weekends, as he had during their courtship; the only difference was that now they were permitted to share a bed. Even that comfort was denied Sara come Tuesdays, though; “this a.m.—I was just going to say something to you,” she wrote him plaintively, “when I remembered—with a pang, that you weren’t there—There was such a strange unwelcome flatness in the bottom of your mattress.”

They both hoped desperately for a child—“the real rock of our future happiness,” as Gerald described it—and thought Sara might be pregnant in the autumn. She was doing hospital volunteer work at the time and had caught a persistent cold, which brought on a torrent of maternal concern. “The work you are doing is very dangerous when you have any kind of a cold,” wrote Adeline warningly from East Hampton, “and really you should not go about in hospitals while you are so susceptible to all infection.” She barraged her daughter with cold prescriptions that, she said, should be filled immediately (she enclosed $1 to pay for them). In the end she persuaded Sara to come back to the Dunes to be coddled.

The pregnancy proved to be a false alarm, however; and in November, Adeline’s own health took a turn for the worse. Although she had dwindled of late into a kind of professional state of delicacy, this new development seemed potentially critical: returning to New York alone, having left Sara in East Hampton, Gerald felt a preliminary pang of regret. “I’m so glad to have seen your mother,” he told Sara in a note written from the train. “I wish I’d kissed her hand. Do it for me.” His sense of farewell was prophetic: just after the New Year, Adeline Wiborg died at home at 40 Fifth Avenue.

In five scrapbooks, bound in black leather and individually wrapped in the gaily printed cotton called tissu de Provence, Sara Wiborg Murphy chronicled the first dozen years of her new life with Gerald. Photographs, lovingly captioned, alternate with clippings and bits of memorabilia: cards, snippets of fabric, locks of hair. In the first scrapbook, the first entry is a clipping taken from the New York Herald on the Friday after Olga’s wedding to Sidney Fish: “
MISS
WIBORG
TO BE
BRIDE
OF
GERALD
MURPHY
,” it says. There is no trace of Adeline Wiborg’s tersely correct obituary, which appeared in the New York Times on January 4, 1917, and mentioned neither the date nor the cause of its subject’s demise. Instead, the next item in Sara’s scrapbook is a rather saccharine poem, cut from a newspaper, entitled “First Born.” It begins, “Your little hands clutch at the world / As something new and strange.” Under it Sara has written a date, December 19, 1917. On that day, as Gerald noted in Sara’s diary (Sara being too weak to do so), “Honoria Adeline [was] born at 8 P.M. Showed much spirit and alertness even when held up by the heels.”

Gerald always claimed, in later life, that his daughter was not named for anyone in either family; but in fact she carried the name not only of his late mother-in-law, but also of Honoria Roberts Murphy, his great-grandmother, who had emigrated from Ireland in 1832. You could put this lapse down to forgetfulness, or you could suspect that Gerald was covering his tracks. Among the papers he left behind after his death is a loose sheet bearing a litany of names redolent of Celtic twilight—Cormac, Aongus, Baoth, Niall, Brighid, and “Honor or Onora.” Elsewhere, in a little pigskin notebook, is a similar list containing the name Honoria Adeline Murphy. It seems as if, in naming her, Gerald was covertly reaffirming the Irishness that Patrick Murphy had come to New York to escape. And in adding Adeline’s name to Honoria’s, just as he and Sara had furnished their house with the quaint castoffs of their parents’ generation, he made another nod in the direction of the past.

Certainly the past must have seemed safer that December than the bright future they had imagined for themselves. In April the United States had entered the Great War, and all through the summer and fall Gerald’s classmates and contemporaries had been enlisting in the fight. Fred, at first rejected because of his physical frailty, fought his way into the army as a private in the Sixth Field Artillery Division and by the end of the year was waiting to be shipped out to France. Hoytie, distressed, as they all were, by stories of the casualties in the trenches, had decided to volunteer as a nurse in the ambulance corps. Gerald tried for months to arrange an officer’s commission—one intercessor on behalf of “my friend, Gerald Murphy” was the muckraker Ida Tarbell—and in November, the week after Sara’s birthday, he went to Washington in person to try to move things along. But he was discouraged to learn that it would probably take at least two months more before he could be commissioned. He and Sara were anxiously awaiting Honoria’s birth, which perhaps made him feel all the more strongly the need to commit himself. On November 22 he, like Fred, enlisted in the army as a private. To commemorate the occasion he had a photographic portrait taken: in it he stands, braced and solemn, in his private’s khakis, his breeches neatly creased, his puttees wrapped as tightly as mummy bandages. His face, under his broad-brimmed doughboy’s hat, appears apprehensive and uncomfortable. It is perhaps the only photograph of Gerald in costume in which he does not seem completely at ease, as if this were one part for which he was miscast.

That Christmas was a bittersweet one for the Murphys. They were still in mourning for Adeline, and Sara was confined to bed, recovering from a painful and difficult delivery. They made a brave effort at gaiety: they put a small Christmas tree in Sara’s room and trimmed it with miniature ornaments; they pinned a sprig of mistletoe to Honoria’s crib, and placed her Christmas and birthday gifts—a silver mug from Anna Murphy, silk dresses, jewelry, money, and a bank passbook from Frank Wiborg—under the little tree. But over their celebration hung the pall of Gerald’s imminent departure.

On December 30, her parents’ second wedding anniversary, Honoria was baptized at home, wearing a christening dress of cherry-colored silk overlaid with embroidered lace—“royal and overpowering—but quaint in effect,” commented her mother, who was still forbidden to get up and had to watch the proceedings, which took place in the adjoining bedroom, in a “courting mirror” held by Helen Stewart, the baby nurse. As an anniversary present (or a christening gift?) Frank Wiborg bought 50 West 11th Street from Patrick Murphy and presented the deed to his daughter and soldier son-in-law. Now, whatever happened, they had a home that was truly their own. Two days later, on New Year’s Day, came “the greatest anguish of our lives”: kissing his wife and infant daughter good-bye, Gerald went to Pennsylvania Station for the train that would carry him to Ground Officers’ Training School in Texas, and thence, he hoped, to war.

The train journey was miserable: it was bitterly cold, and the men were crowded into narrow berths in a mostly unheated sleeping car. Gerald had a sore throat and runny nose, and dosed himself from the traveling medicine chest Sara had given him. For comfort he had packed one of Honoria’s little baby shirts, and through the night he held it next to his cheek. The warmth of it, and its sweet baby scent, contrasted with the “ugliness” and the “permeating smell of cold steel” that enveloped him, and, he wrote Sara, “brought me back with a pang to you both in that lovely white room with its suffused candle-light and flowers.”

Fort Kelly, a mile and a half outside of San Antonio, was a long way away from that lovely white room. Rows of dark khaki tents flanked a central drill ground, with the whole surrounded by “miles of flat dust-lands, not white with a good clear glare,—but black & cruel yellow-black, stale and unprofitable.” Gerald had at first been attracted by the endless space and “featureless horizon” of the level Texas landscape, but soon the rigors of the recruit’s life made him see it differently. The men slept nearly thirty to a tent on canvas cots with straw mattresses; the showers (cold) were situated at the end of the barracks, and the only working latrine was outside. The climate was fierce: a week after Gerald’s arrival the camp was devastated by a sandstorm that filled the air with black dust, blotted out the sun, blew down tents, sent pack mules on a rampage, and caused truck drivers to crash blindly into barracks. In two hours, the thermometer plunged sixty-one degrees as rain, sleet, and finally snow mixed with the flying dust. During the night four enlisted men froze to death and four more killed themselves out of desperation and terror. Those less afflicted still suffered from the dust, which brought with it pinkeye and all kinds of bronchial ailments. At night the tents were so filled with the barking sound of coughing that they sounded like a kennel. And it was so cold and damp that Gerald slept in a woolen union suit, sweater, muffler, bathrobe, and bed boots under four layers of blankets.