Everybody Was So Young (13 page)

Sara, distressed at his situation, kept sending him packets of clothing—puttees, pajamas, shirts from Brooks Brothers, caps lovingly knitted by her mother’s sister, Aunt Mame—as well as homemade bran muffins and squares of washed cheesecloth for him to use as disposable handkerchiefs. Anna Murphy was less sympathetic, writing him “that I must get a lot out of this experience, that it was good for me and that the War was ‘a great developer.’” Anna had written him the same sort of letters at school “and I thought her heartless,” Gerald said, but now he could bear such exhortations with equanimity. For he had Sara and “our fragrant garden baby,” whose tiny shirt he kept under his pillow. “It gives me such courage now to think of us established as a little family,” he wrote Sara. “I believe so in us—it is my creed—we can do anything with ourselves.”

At the end of January, to his relief, he was accepted for the School of Aeronautics and was shipped out to Ohio. The train trip to Columbus took three days and nights, all spent sitting up in three overcrowded day coaches. Gerald discovered two Yale friends, the Kentuckian Menefee Clancy and Dan Nugent of St. Louis, among his comrades-in arms, and after the three sons of Eli had sat up all night in their uniforms Nugent suggested they disembark during a stopover in St. Louis and accompany him to the Racquet Club for a shower. Although Gerald was suffering from a cold, he thought the whole experience was a fine adventure. But when he telephoned Sara to regale her (the first time they had spoken since he left), the sound of his hoarse voice undid her.

“It has made me too homesick for you—to hear your voice,” she wrote him in a tearstained note immediately afterward; “some things seem too much for one—to be borne—I try not to cry—on account of Honoria, but today I can’t succeed.” Then, scrawling, “I’ll go on with this tomorrow,” she enclosed a rose petal that she and Honoria had kissed.

This breakdown was uncharacteristic, for in general Sara had kept busy and cheerful learning to look after Honoria and getting her own strength back. Her letters were full of the baby’s looks and doings—her weight (satisfactorily gaining), her “brilliant dark gray blue” eyes, her “pale bronze lashes,” her way of stretching her toes to the fire or staring intently into her mother’s face. But although Sara clearly reveled in every aspect of her new life as a mother, it was far from the only thing on her mind. She was keeping up with the war news, sending Gerald clippings from the New York papers about the likelihood of a German counteroffensive along the Marne, and speculating about the divisive effects of the Bolshevik revolution on the internal affairs of Austria and Germany. “What a triumph for Socialism,” she wrote, “the war won by Psychology,—instead of Steel—what a slap in the eye for Force of Arms. . . . (How we should love it, shouldn’t we?)”

She had drawn together a kind of nursery salon on 11th Street: her old friend Rue Carpenter came with her husband, John, whose new symphony was about to have its premiere in New York; and Monty Woolley dropped by to update her on his vicissitudes with the draft board (he was trying to get exempted from military service). He was charmed by Honoria, to Sara’s surprise—but not everyone was so comfortable with the novel and unembarrassed way Sara blended her roles as mother and hostess. Two gentleman friends were present one afternoon when (as Sara wrote Gerald afterward, with endearing candor) the baby had “the most fearful movement . . . a real cannonnade (too many n’s—never mind) . . . But instead of laughing,—as I hoped they would—as honest men,—they became most offhand—& talked loudly of other matters—their faces growing more & more refined—How false to try to ‘carry off’ anything of the kind. And it put me in the position of‘Mortified Young Mother’ whereas I felt nothing of the kind.”

Her serenity and composure stood in some contrast to the emotional storms raging around the corner at 40 Fifth Avenue, where her family were all “miserable.” Hoytie was preparing to leave for France and the ambulance corps; Frank, doubtless anxious about the menace of German submarines and concerned about the dangers his daughter would face behind the lines, went into scolding paterfamilias mode, warning her to get her affairs in order before she sailed because she might not come back—but no one paid him any attention. Olga, grass-widowed when Sidney Fish joined the army, had come to stay at Number 40, and she and Hoytie and Frank had been quarreling fearfully over trifles like the amount of time each family member spent on the telephone; after one particularly stinking row Olga moved to the Brevoort Hotel in a huff. Everyone had colds, and Frank had come down with what was at first thought to be mumps (it was only a bad sore throat). But Sara reported to Gerald that she felt “exactly as though I were in a calm backwater,—watching logs and debris piling and plunging along in the flood. I don’t even enter the fights as umpire now,—as I always used to be tempted to do,—(thereby invariably being drawn in, sooner or later).”

It helped that she had a place of her own, “surrounded by the beautiful things” he had picked out for them. In the days of their courtship she and Gerald had often dreamed of some pastoral place to which they could escape. In their recent, wartime letters “our little farm” had been a recurring theme, and 11th Street represented an urban version. Like the Australian bower-bird that attracts its mate by furnishing its nest with bright found objects, feathers, and flowers, the Murphys took turns embellishing “our beautiful house.” Even on his way to San Antonio Gerald had found time, during a brief stopover in New Orleans, to acquire an Empire chest of drawers, six oyster plates (“only .75 each”) with an antique M in the middle, a pair of Empire candelabra, assorted old vases and lamps, curtain tiebacks, a hot toddy set, a “strange large lavender pitcher for Honoria’s bath,” and a set of antique children’s plates, each decorated with a French puzzle sentence—a marvelously eccentric list. Now Sara was busying herself making new mulberry red curtains for the sitting room—to drape over the pale blue chiffon under-curtains already in the window (“the blue makes quite a lovely light,” she commented)—and looking for an old pier glass to hang between the windows.

But as much comfort as she took in it, “our house—where I have never been without you”—made her wistful, too. “I still find my ears straining for your key in the lock—and that bang of the knocker when the door is opened—and then I have a sinking recollection, when it turns out to be Miss Stewart, coming in. Jerry dearest,—don’t let’s ever separate again. . . . Because without you I am only existing—I am less than half of myself.” She missed him so much, it was a tangible, physical hunger. “I was thinking today,” Sara wrote, as Gerald was on his way to Columbus, “of how much I’d like to kiss that little hole in the front of your neck—or either side of your mouth—Perhaps I will—very soon.”

With Gerald’s transfer to flight training school a reunion now became possible: Sara could come out to Columbus and he could join her and the baby at a hotel in town when he had liberty. The very thought threw Sara into a spasm of anxiety: Would Gerald be embarrassed by her appearance, dressed as she still was “in rusty black” in mourning for her mother? Would the lunch and supper hours Gerald was allowed conflict with Honoria’s nursing schedule? Gerald’s own temper was short: there was a mix-up about her hotel reservation which delayed her arrival by a day, and he grouchily accused her of staying in New York to see Hoytie off for France (she hadn’t), wasting a whole twenty-four hours of the leave he had arranged for himself. But finally Sara, Honoria, and Miss Stewart, accompanied by enough equipment and clothing to outfit a small army, arrived at the Hotel Deshler in Columbus for a ten-day stay.

The reunion was sweet, even if it was only for ten days in less than ideal circumstances: they could share meals in tearooms and laugh at the surly waitress, play with their adored baby daughter, hold hands and whisper in darkened taxis, even (when Gerald had no guard duty) spend the night together. It had been a long time since they had been able to be with each other in this way, and Sara was desolate when Frank Wiborg came out to Columbus to accompany his daughter and her entourage home. “You see,” she wrote Gerald afterward, “I can only be happy where you are.”

For the next few months Gerald buckled down to his preflight studies as he never had to his undergraduate work at Yale. To prepare for the dreaded elimination exams he woke at 3:30 a.m. to pore over his books in the latrines, the only place with enough light to read by, until 6:00. Sara hoped the result would be a staff posting in Washington or, even better, at Mineola on Long Island, where she could set up housekeeping with Olga, and she offered to have Frank Wiborg pull some strings to make this happen. But Gerald wanted the real thing: flight training and transfer to the front lines in France, where Fred, who had transferred to the Tank Corps and been promoted to the rank of second lieutenant, had already seen action.

By the end of March, Gerald had passed his exams and was commissioned as a second lieutenant, assigned to the 838th Aero Squadron in Garden City, New York. In June he was made intelligence officer of the post, but by the end of the summer he was no closer to France; and on August 22 he was transferred again, to the Aviation Recruit Receiving Depot at Fort Wayne, outside of Detroit, where he was pigeonholed as a “casual,” to serve as and when needed, a real blow to his pride. Although he formed warm friendships with his brother officers, he disliked his superiors, who, “while the British in Palestine destroy two whole Turkish Armies,” spent their time bickering over “whether the girls in the Motor Corps and Canteens are of sufficiently good social standing to be given a dance.” Impatient to get overseas, he pulled every string he could: he approached a former Yale and Hotchkiss colleague who was an officer in the Aviation Section in Washington; Frank Wiborg wrote a general he knew; Fred and Hoytie were delegated to try to wangle him a staff job with General Henry T. Allen in France; Patrick Murphys friend J. M. Tumulty, President Wilson’s secretary, did “everything I properly can to be of service.”

Uncertain about his situation, he wanted desperately to see Sara but couldn’t quite commit to the idea of having her move to Michigan to be with him. He was able to get them married officers’ quarters on the base, and she began shuttling back and forth from New York to Detroit by train, spending weekends with Gerald and speeding back to Honoria afterward. Their visits were sweet. “What fun we had—all week! in that fusty old place! And how much [underlined with two squiggly lines] I love you,” Sara wrote. But the partings were painful. They clung to each other so passionately at the railway station on one occasion that a fellow passenger remarked on it sympathetically in the train afterward. They comforted themselves with talismans: when Gerald found her unfinished cigarette in their quarters he lit it and smoked it down to the end, just to feel closer to her—then he saved the holder.

A greater comfort than talismans was the possibility that Sara might be pregnant again. By the end of September they were certain of it, and Gerald was cautioning her not to take any risks that might endanger her health or the baby’s. Soon there was more encouraging news: a wire and then a letter from Tumulty, followed by orders from the War Department, announced Gerald’s transfer to the Air Service Training Brigade in Mineola, Long Island. “You ought to be proud of this boy,” wrote Tumulty to Patrick Murphy—the sort of praise Gerald had so rarely heard from his father’s lips. It appeared as if he might finally be on the verge of going overseas. But then, on November 11, the guns along the western front fell silent for the first time in four years. The German army had surrendered, and the Great War was over.

“Jerry my Berry dearest,” wrote Sara, using a nickname she had invented early in their courtship:

Just a line before I go to bed to say how much I love you and how [underlined twice] I look forward . . . to the time when our little family (of 3½) will be all together under one roof. . . . And the little one half will arrive to a happy, united family and not one separated, or about to separate. . . . I wonder if you have regrets—about not going to France—even though I cannot (personally) help thinking . . . that it might not have done you good but harm. . . . For us—(so it seems to me) separation does not bring a spiritual development, rather it delays it. . . . But I could not bear it if you felt you had missed a chance—that it was something you would half regret and have to explain—always. . . .

God bless you and keep you safe—I love you.

Your wife,

Sal

He did have regrets. Not just about missing action, but about what he felt his war service had shown him about his character. On December 11, as the men who had served under him filed past and shook his hand in farewell, he was surprised to find himself “completely knocked out.”

I must have cared for them more than I knew—and more than they knew. It is this that pains. All that I have made them feel is a cold kindness and a decent interest in their welfare,—while all the time I have loved them! . . .. It enrages me to think that this consciousness of relationship that I feel toward those whom I want to have like me—should blur my true feelings. I longed so to have them know—and they are gone. . . . It is my fault. How meagerly equipped I am for human expression. . . . I have felt—at all times—complex and forced in my efforts to show these men how I felt. . . . I must resign from the world of human relationship—I’m no good at it, if I have failed to show these simple souls my real feelings. . . . Thank God for you—to whom I—alone—feel that I have shown in full the love I bear.

It was the old story for Gerald—this feeling that he existed as if behind a glass wall that kept him from honestly connecting with the people he truly cared for. And it would become a familiar one in the years to come, as he and Sara began in earnest to make the life they had been dreaming of since their marriage.

8

“The idea is thrilling to me”

TO
CELEBRATE
HONORIA
ADELINE
MURPHY’S second Christmas her parents gave gifts in her name to the Red Cross and the Belgian Babies’ Fund. Remembering those whom fate had treated less kindly than their own “little family of 3½,” they also sent checks to Fatherless Children of France in lieu of lavish presents to each other or to others in their families. But even as they enjoyed the blessings of peace, they found themselves wondering what the next step was.