Everybody Was So Young (14 page)

They loved their pretty house on 11th Street (Sara was already planning additions for when the new baby arrived), and they played the part of young parents with enthusiasm, dressing Honoria in a dazzling array of Kate Greenaway-inspired outfits and chronicling her every weight gain or new tooth in Sara’s scrapbook. When Honoria was separated for a few days from her favorite playmate, a neighbor’s boy of her own age, Gerald concocted an excruciatingly polite miniature letter from the little boy, saying he had been ill but would be able to play with her soon. The letter was enclosed in a tiny envelope no bigger than a postage stamp with a tiny dot of “sealing wax” and a tiny pretend stamp with a tiny cancelation mark on it.

Entertaining though such nursery games were, they were only games. Gerald was going to have to do something to “get a grip on our future,” as he put it. Mark Cross, it was clear, was worse than a dead end for him. He had always felt ill at ease, like an impostor, in the boardrooms and at the dinner tables that were his father’s natural habitat, and he had failed in his one attempt to leave his imprint on the company. In 1915, before the war, Patrick had asked him to try his hand at designing an inexpensive safety razor, and Gerald was on the verge of patenting the result when King Gillette beat him to market with his own version. Now, he felt, his father would always second-guess him, as he did Fred (who was demobilized and working for Cross in England). When the elder Murphy asked Gerald what he planned to do when his demobilization papers came through, he made a life-changing decision. He wanted to go to Harvard, he said, and study landscape architecture.

“I had to say something,” he explained later, “and that’s what came out.” But it wasn’t quite so haphazard a response as he maintained. He had always had an eye for space and color: even his bleakest wartime letters were lit up by images—of the Mexican market in San Antonio with its jumble of colors, of the “spangled tights” of a Seuratesque tightrope walker at a street fair, or the “enormously fat Percherons” he saw pulling a sledge in Columbus, “dappled grey (handpainted!) with heavy manes and fetlocks, soft grey noses, and the beloved crease down the back.” That winter, after his demobilization, he had been studying drawing in New York with a Miss Weir at the School of Design and Liberal Arts, a pursuit Sara applauded: “I do think it so remarkable,—not that you could do it,—but that, as you could do it as well as that, you had never found it out before now. It’s amazing.”

“My parents had a plan,” Honoria said many years afterward, a plan that sounds like something one of Tolstoy’s utopian-minded characters might have sketched out at the dinner table. Part of the plan was a bucolic setting (“our little farm”), but a more important part of it was a life centered around some kind of artistic endeavor, where work and life were one, and where man and wife could—would—be able to work shoulder to shoulder. As Gerald envisioned it: “When we wake up in the morning the question and work of the day will belong to both of us. Think what this means!! To be able to work together over the same thing. What husbands and wives can do this?! Think of our being able to add to all that we already share—the very work of our hands and brains. The idea is thrilling to me.” Whether they were making gardens, like Candide and Cunegonde, or painting or potting seemed almost beside the point.

As bitter a pill as Gerald’s repudiation of Mark Cross may have seemed to Patrick Murphy, he swallowed it with good grace, possibly because his wife uncharacteristically supported her son’s decision. And whatever his feelings, he was jubilant when he, Fred, Frank Wiborg, and Hoytie (all of whom were in London at the time) received a cablegram announcing the birth, in New York, of a “male Murphy” on May 13, 1919. “There was wild yelling,” reported Sara, “and they all opened champagne and caroused over the heir—& the grandpapas did a lot of handshaking & yelling—Hoytie says Father takes on as though he had given birth to a son himself.”

The new baby was named Baoth Wiborg Murphy (Baoth was one of those old Irish names on Gerald’s original list), but for the first few months of his life his parents called him either “the boy” or (Sara’s preference) “Dubbedy,” which may have been Honoria’s version of “the baby.” Sara was enchanted with his gold hair and merry face—“How alike we are!” she wrote on the back of one photograph of him. Soon her scrapbook was full of exquisite watercolor sketches of Baoth, in celadon greens, pinks and peaches and golds, like the ones she had done of Honoria.

Gerald did not have long to enjoy his little son, however, for by the beginning of June he was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, living at the Brattle Inn and enrolled in Harvard’s School of Landscape Architecture. He was immediately enthralled by the work: surveying a lily pond at the botanical gardens, covered with white, yellow, pink, and lavender blooms; bisecting tree trunks “at 300 ft. distance with a telescope which has a double lens with cobwebs [crosshairs?] transversely across it”; or cramming Latin for botanical classifications. He had got Sara a catalogue for the Women’s School—which offered identical graduate classes with the same professors, but under a different roof—so she could enroll in the same courses he had. And he was scouting out houses for them in the fall. They had decided, reluctantly, to give up 50 West 11th. They still loved the house but “look[ed] upon it as an invaded retreat,” subject to sudden incursions from 40 Fifth Avenue and surrounded by the alien forces of New York society. So Gerald got Alice James (the wife of William James, Jr., and one of Cambridge’s social and intellectual arbiters) to go with him while he looked at square Georgian clapboards and modern stucco villas and even “one manor with immemorial elms on the lawn, barricades of lilac, a cupola, etc.”

Rue and John Carpenter had also turned up in Cambridge (John was a Harvard graduate, class of 1897), and through them Gerald was introduced to Amy Lowell, the cigar-smoking scholar, poet, and scion of a definitively Brahmin Boston family. Lowell had taken over leadership of the imagist school of poetry from Ezra Pound in 1914, and she had recently published a pioneering study of new verse, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry. She was “an amazing creature—rather like a large, formidable frog, with a brain like a dynamo”—and she startled Gerald by demanding that he and the Carpenters come to dinner with her that very evening.

Lowell lived in grand style in Brookline, across the river from Cambridge, in a beautiful Georgian house built by her ancestors and surrounded by pre-Revolutionary gardens that fascinated the neophyte landscape architect. She and Gerald had much to talk about, for in addition to her passion for gardening—she had become a keen student of the work of the English landscape designer Gertrude Jekyll—she was deeply versed in an astonishing array of other subjects. Her interests ranged from fairy tales and Orientalia to carriage-driving and English literature (her collection of Keats editions and incunabula was remarkable) and coaching, and at the time she was immersed in translating a collection of Chinese poetry, written in 700 B.C., from the Mandarin. As Gerald discovered, she had a rather mandarin quality herself.

After dinner, while her companion, the actress Ada Russell, entertained the ladies, Lowell offered her favorite cigars to the gentlemen and then spirited Gerald off for a discussion of Russian novels. He wasn’t the least bit nonplussed by the postprandial arrangements, being a habitué of Elizabeth Marbury’s, Anne Morgan’s, and Elsie De Wolfe’s dinner parties. But his tête-à-tête with Lowell took an alarming turn when he observed that he found many of the characters in Russian fiction to be “such weak animals that the hopelessness of it all becomes unreal.” Whirling on him, Lowell demanded, “Repeat that!” And when he did, rather haltingly, she whipped out a pencil, wrote down his words, and then muttered, “Weak animals, weak animals is right, weak animals is good!” To the consternation of the other awestruck guests, Gerald roared with laughter. “She knows everything about everything,” he told Sara, “yet she’s so cordial and human.”

What Lowell represented for Gerald was something he had been hungering for, a combination of unconventional aristocracy and intellectualism, of social and cultural engagement. This was a world where he and Sara could flourish, and he could hardly wait until they could be transplanted to it. The only element of uncertainty was financial: somehow, with the return to civilian life, Baoth’s birth, the removal to Cambridge, and other expenses, Gerald was overextended, and it took an infusion of cash from Fred to pay off his outstanding bills. Gerald was grateful, but inclined to be a little defiant. Although he lamented his inability “to anticipate the need, use, and value of money,” he felt that his own family, and his in-laws, paid entirely too much attention to the subject. “I’m so glad,” he told Sara huffily, “that there’s no evidence of it up here.”

Perhaps he felt he could afford to be grand, for Frank Wiborg had decided, like King Lear, to divide his assets among his three daughters before his death, and Sara would soon be mistress of a substantial amount of capital. In preparation, Frank had taken to thrusting pamphlets about “The Safe Keeping of Securities” into her hands at opportune moments. Sara tried to be appreciative but admitted to feeling mystified. “Who can we get to teach us about amortization, & assessments & depletion?” she asked. “It all sounds like diseases to me. . . . Can’t we just go on trusting in God & the Columbia Trust Co.?” Of course she knew they couldn’t: although she told Gerald she agreed with him in principle that money wasn’t a fit object for obsession, “Nothing, I think, chains one so much to it, as entirely disregarding it does. Mismanagement brings it always before the eye.”

With 11th Street rented out, Sara had packed up all their belongings and, with the children and Miss Stewart, moved to East Hampton for the summer. Although the sea and the sand held a perpetual allure for her, she felt “exasperated” by this return to her old life. “I’ve never been away from it enough as yet,—and I feel its claws still in me,” she told Gerald. Frank, as usual, was “running the legs off his guests” with mornings of nonstop golf, lawn bowling, and croquet, punctuated by walks about the estate to view the livestock and drives to Montauk or other points of interest, and Hoytie and Olga (Gerald referred to them as Scylla and Charybdis) were at each other’s throats again. Hoytie had given Olga a surprise party for her birthday, hanging lanterns in the trees and smuggling a dance band and caterers and all of Olga’s best friends into the house while Sidney and Olga were out to dinner. But instead of being pleased, Olga was furious, complaining that the house had been overrun by “hoodlums” who misplaced the bric-a-brac. She went off to bed in the middle of the party and spent all the next day complaining about the noise and the damage, to which Hoytie responded histrionically, “Things, things: Olga’s life is made up of nothing but things.”

Caught in the middle yet again, Sara blamed herself for not being able to keep the peace, and raged inwardly that her own plans and hopes seemed to be so easily blown off course by these familial storms. Gerald comforted her long distance as best he could: “I believe in you so,” he wrote. “Our new life is but one thing: your ideals and principles and character organized and put into actuality by me. You were a woman and couldn’t do it—on account of your family—I am a man and can, in spite of everything. Don’t you see, my dear girl, how you taught me to do the things that life and society forbade you to?!” In fact she was beginning to see it, and was beginning to put her ideals and principles into practice by herself.

At the end of July the country had been shocked by an outbreak of racial violence in Washington, D. C., that began when a white mob spearheaded by two hundred sailors and marines swept through black neighborhoods searching for two youths who had been apprehended and released after reportedly insulting the wife of a naval officer. A policeman was shot in the process, setting off a rampage in which black men and women were beaten and their homes burned, and blacks in their turn invaded white neighborhoods; there were many injuries and at least ten deaths, and more than two thousand troops and police officers were required to restore order. Against this background of racial unrest, Mary McLeod Bethune, one of the leaders of the National Association of Colored Women, arrived in Long Island on a fundraising tour for the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls, a school she had founded in Florida. And when her train pulled into the East Hampton station, Sara Wiborg Murphy was there to meet it.

Despite her father’s political connections and aspirations, Sara was something less than activist: she didn’t march for women’s suffrage or sign petitions. But Bethune, the seventeenth child of former slaves, stirred her: her “dignity of labor” philosophy, her kindness, directness, and grace, spoke to Sara, and she felt impelled to help Bethune’s cause. Hoytie was less enthusiastic (Frank was away in Washington consulting to the Tariff Commission), and she drew the line at inviting Bethune to spend the night at the Dunes. What, she asked her sister, would the servants think? Reluctantly Sara compromised on allowing Bethune to stay with a local black family, but she insisted on inviting her to spend the day at the Dunes, and held a fund-raising meeting to which the eleemosynarily inclined of East Hampton’s elite were invited. They had lunch in the enormous baronial dining room—the Irish maids frostily handing around the peas—and discussed the Washington riots. Bethune’s comments were “frightfully interesting,” thought Sara. Earlier she had proudly showed off Honoria and Baoth to her visitor. “Has she ever seen a Negro before?” Bethune inquired about Honoria and, when Sara admitted that she hadn’t, remarked, “Oh, then she will be afraid of me.” Said Sara to Gerald later, “I was so glad that she wasn’t.”

At the end of September the Murphys moved to 149 Brattle Street in Cambridge, a pleasant, square frame house with a wide porch, shaded by old trees. Sara was delighted with the change. “We need a new place,” she had sighed in her last weeks at East Hampton. “Isn’t it amazing what a refreshed outlook it gives one?”

Gerald certainly showed its effects: he had done unusually well in his summer courses and now took on a substantial load of new ones, freehand drawing and architecture, as well as courses in landscaping. Unfortunately, burdened with setting up a new household and satisfying the demands of two very small children, Sara couldn’t join him. Her scrapbooks tell the story: whereas she had chronicled the great events of Honoria’s infancy—first step, first tooth, first haircut—with pasted photos and carefully inked captions, Baoth’s milestones were recorded on slips of white paper tucked into the book, as if awaiting some leisurely afternoon (which never materialized) when she would have time to do it all properly.