Everybody Was So Young (39 page)

The other was from Hoytie. “
YOU
WILL
NOT
HAVE
A
LUCKY
JOURNEY
FOR
WHAT
YOU
HAVE
DONE
IN
BREAKING
FATHER’S
PLANS
FOR
US.
ALL
HIS
REPROACHES
WILL
BE
WITH
YOU
.” She had signed it with only her initial, “H.”

19

“We try to be like what you want us to be”

IN
THE
HOME
MOVIES
they filmed that summer the sun is always shining. The wind bellies out the sails of the Weatherbird and flutters the flag Gerald designed for it, which Picasso so admired, a stylized eye in black, white, and red on a yellow ground that appears to wink as it waves. Sara squints into the sunlight or lifts her glass to toast the company. The boys, in striped jerseys that match the crew’s, shinny up and down the masts—Baoth sturdy and strong, Patrick wiry and quick—or have toe-wrestling matches with their bare feet, or swim naked in the crystalline water. Honoria, looking more like a Renoir than ever, smiles demurely from beneath her hat brim or giggles with her friend Fanny. Gerald, his white shirt open to the waist of his white trousers, a white kerchief around his neck and a white slouch hat on his head, points toward some wonderful destination.

In one sequence Baoth has stuffed something into the front of his jersey to give him a voluptuous, Mae West profile, which he exhibits proudly to the camera; in another some of the sailors put him into a canvas bag, like the count of Monte Cristo, and dunk him in the ocean. He emerges laughing moments later. In still others Patrick deftly receives the American flag when it’s taken in at day’s end, folding it carefully into a regulation triangle, or sits with his fishing rod in hand, intently waiting for a bite. The girls show off their swimming strokes and clamber up the floating stairs at the side of the boat. The camera pans slowly along the rocky coastline, past calanques and fortresses and picturesque fishing ports, or lingers lovingly on the sleek hull of the Weatherbird itself, low and dark in the water.

The country is beautiful: “260 kilometres of wheat, sun, mules, threshing, oxen drawing, hats, Tio Pepe,—well, you know,” writes Gerald on a postcard (with a little drawing of a hat) to Pauline and Ernest Hemingway. And “the boat (& the sea) were never so nice (or so blue),” adds Sara. It is a perfect summer.

Léger—bringing prints of Ballet mécanique and Entr’acte to screen—met them when they reached Gibraltar on the Conte di Savoia. He had sailed from Antibes with Vladimir and the crew, and as a thank-you to the Murphys he had made them a book of watercolors to commemorate his voyage, signing it, “A Sara à Gerald, leur mousse très dévoué” (“To Sara, to Gerald, their very devoted cabin boy”). He had reason for his devotion, for in addition to the cruise and the trip he had made to America in 1931 under their auspices, they had been sending him numerous “small checks” over the past year to help him out.

Villa America was lovelier than ever. Gerald (as he had done with Sara and Ellen Barry years ago) took Honoria and Fanny to Madame Vachon’s fashionable boutique in St.-Tropez to outfit them with dresses and crocheted sandals, scooping up other pretty things by the dozen to take home as presents. One evening he and Sara accompanied the girls to the casino in Juan-les-Pins for dinner and dancing, an outing for which Sara made sure they were both wearing stockings. She herself—she told them—had once been denied admission to the Monte Carlo casino because she was bare-legged; but she’d outwitted the fashion police of the Société de Bains de Mer by going outside, where she resourcefully pulled a brown eye pencil from her evening bag and drew a line down the backs of her legs to look like a seam. No such ruse was required on this occasion, though; and inside the casino Gerald swept them around the floor, just like the dancer who was making such a sensation in the movie of Cole Porter’s Gay Divorcee, Fred Astaire. Fanny Myers, a dark young beauty of considerable height who was wearing her very first evening dress, was horribly self-conscious to discover that her adolescent growth spurt (and her new high heels) had made her slightly taller than Gerald. In an effort to minimize the difference she slouched down when he led her onto the dance floor, but Gerald admonished her. “Stand up straight,” he told her. “I know I’ll be shorter than you, but you will look more beautiful if you stand tall.”

The Murphys sailed back to New York on the Aquitania the first week of September, and went directly to Hook Pond to get the children ready for school. There were new shoes to buy, routine doctor’s and dentist’s visits to make, trunks to pack—the familiar parental rituals of autumn. Meanwhile the children tried to catch the remnants of summer and make them last. One afternoon Baoth and Honoria were lying on the beach after swimming when Gerald came over the dune and walked slowly down to them. Honoria knew at once that something was wrong. “Children,” Gerald said, “I have some bad news for you. Patrick has had a rechute [relapse].”

A routine checkup had revealed a spot on Patrick’s “good” lung, the one he had been “living on,” in Gerald’s parlance. Almost immediately there followed the dreaded sequence of fever, loss of appetite, and difficulty breathing. Instead of going off to the Harvey School as he had dreamed of doing, Patrick was admitted to Doctor’s Hospital on East End Avenue in New York, where he was confined to bed and only occasionally allowed to sit up in order to use his beloved etching tools or paints. Honoria came to visit him on weekends home from her new school, Rosemary Hall, in Greenwich, Connecticut, and was struck by his pallor as he lay against the white pillows. He had always been a delicate-looking child, but now he seemed practically transparent.

“Isn’t it horrid?” wrote Sara to Ernest and Pauline: “And what a fool’s paradise it is ever to think you have won a victory over the White plague!!—Well, he is going to be alright ultimately, & all our fighting blood is up again . . . but at times it does seem too much,—Especially as he himself is so decent about it all.” The rest of the letter is cheery and gossipy; only in the hastily scrawled postscript did she let her anguish show. Under the message “Dow dow sends best love,” she wrote a single line, without closing punctuation: “I wish I knew some more words”

Sara’s fighting blood didn’t fool any of the Murphys’ friends, who saw—even if the Murphys could not bring themselves to admit—the seriousness of Patrick’s condition. Esther Murphy Strachey confided to a friend that “the doctors have told Gerald he cannot live through the summer.” Alice Lee Myers and Katy Dos Passos wrote to express their concern; and Ernest managed to go them one better by offering to send “either a Grants Gazelle or an Impalla” head to Patrick—whichever he’d like—They are really no trouble—(housebroken) very clean and light and quite beautiful to look at when you’re in bed—Impalla is the most beautiful I think and I have a record one he would like. . . . Tell Patrick they are the ones that float in the air when they jump and jump over each others backs.”

But it was Archie MacLeish who most perceptively, and poignantly, caught the meaning of what was happening to his friends, and to his friends’ son. He wrote Patrick a letter, detailed and enthralling, about finding an injured animal in the leaves:

I thought as I carried it that it was very hot in my hand but then I thought too that small animals always feel hot to us. When I came to the kitchen under the bright light over the sink I saw what it was . . . a young flying squirrel. . . . I . . . went back into the woods and put it into the bole of a great maple covered with leaves. It lay still there. All night under the brilliant moon I thought of it there and wondered about it. Somehow it had fallen and been hurt or perhaps some hunter had hit it. Its fur was softer than any squirrel. My love to you.

The young animal, flightless now, beautiful and vulnerable, tore at his heart.

In addition to the terrible anxiety they faced because of Patrick’s illness, Gerald and Sara now had the additional burden of financial worries caused by renewed medical expenses and by a crisis within the Mark Cross Company. By the autumn of 1934 the Depression had made serious inroads in sales of the luxury goods for which Mark Cross was known: matched sets of luggage, from steamer trunks to handgrips, were not in great demand if the prospective purchasers could no longer afford the steamer tickets and grand hotels that went with them; nor were sumptuously outfitted picnic hampers or engraved thermoses or noncrushable cigar cases for the finest Havanas. Worse, in her role as president, Lillian Ramsgate had spent down the company’s capital so that by the beginning of 1934 Mark Cross stood on the brink of bankruptcy. The other tenants at 37th Street and Fifth Avenue had already gone under and defaulted, leaving Mark Cross solely responsible for payments of $100,000 yearly to the landlord, Robert Walton Goelet.

Miss Ramsgate decided that the only course was to liquidate the company, and called a meeting of the board of directors in December. Gerald had remained a director even after his resignation as vice president, and his approval was necessary for Miss Ramsgate’s plan; she told him if he didn’t attend the meeting she would resign. He didn’t, and she did. And now the company he had run away from in 1919 was his responsibility.

On December 19 Gerald became president of Mark Cross. In a speech to the employees he said that “I didn’t know one thing about the business but it was all my sister and I had to live on, and so I would have to make a go of it.” Not strictly true, perhaps, but close enough. His first act was to allow Goelet to buy fifty percent of the company as compensation for unpaid rent; his next was to move the business to smaller but more fashionable quarters on Fifth Avenue and 52d Street. He set about a stringent recovery program with the help of a younger Yale man named Ward Cheney, who joined the company as chief financial officer, and he began to redesign the store and its merchandise to bring it into line with market demand. He hired Tomi Parzinger, a chic leather-goods designer, to help give the accessories a more contemporary look; and he retained the services of Alice Lee Myers (whose eye he trusted as he did his own and Sara’s) to seek out elegant European household goods. He even started a line of men’s colognes—there was one called “Cross Country” and another, with a cuir de Russie base, called “Leather.”

Some months after Gerald took up the reins at his father’s company, Dos Passos told Hemingway that “spend[ing] all his time on Mark Cross and the Fifth Avenue Association [a merchant’s group],.. gives [Gerald] something to use his brains on—he’s like he was years ago when he was painting.” This was wishful thinking on Dos Passos’s part. Even though the work allowed him to indulge, for a profit, his unique penchant for discovering recherche country pottery or clever dime-store key cases (which he replicated in the finest leather); even though he could showcase his design sense by putting Mark Cross evening purses together with semiprecious clips from the fashion jeweler Seaman Schepps to create a completely new kind of accessory—this wasn’t art to him. “‘Trade,’” he said to Scott Fitzgerald, was “an efficient drug—harmful but efficient.” He told a friend in later life that his time at Mark Cross felt like sleepwalking.

He and Sara were trying, as usual, to carry on as if nothing cataclysmic were happening, while also trying to support and nurture the friends who meant so much to them. In November—in a letter in which he commissioned Gerald to buy him a batch of new records “to the value of the enclosed check”—Hemingway asked the Murphys to visit and “make a fuss about” an exhibit of paintings by an imprisoned Spanish friend of his and Dos Passos’s. “If you wanted to buy one or a couple it would be swell, but I know with Patrick ill you must have God awful expenses,” he wrote. Gerald and Sara responded: “
YOUR
RECORDS
SHIPPED
PARCEL
POST
YESTERDAY
WOULD
LOVE
TO
SEE
YOU
LISTENING
TO
THEM
QUINTINILLA
SHOW
SUPERB
SPLENDIDLY
HUNG
GOOD
GALLERY
INTELLIGENT
MAN
IN
CHARGE
FINE
ATTENDANCE
FOUR
SOLD
FIRST
DAY
TRYING
TO
SCARE
UP
SOME
WRITEUPS
SARA
SURE
YOU
NEED
CLIMACTIC
CHANGE
PLEASE
COME
STAY
WITH
US. . . .
LOVE
=
MURPHYS
.”

They also managed to subsidize the Dos Passoses’ need for a warm-climate base during the winter. Doss siege of rheumatic disease the previous summer was dangerous enough that his doctor forbade him to come north during the cold months; but money was as chronic a problem for him and Katy as his health, and lack of both was making it hard for him to work sustainedly on The Big Money, the third part of the U.S.A. trilogy that had begun with The 42nd Parallel and continued with 1919. So in addition to a Christmas check—which, Dos reported from Jamaica, “turned into various things notably a bottle of Madeira . . . the rent of a car driven by a brownish smoke with an oxford accent—and into a small rowboat”—the Murphys proposed to rent a house in Key West which the Dosses could use until summer. Perhaps they would be able to visit themselves, they told Katy, if Patrick’s health and the state of Mark Cross permitted.

That fall they had moved to a new apartment, at 539 East 51st Street, whose windows overlooked the East River—the same view that Patrick looked out on from his room at Doctors’ Hospital two miles farther uptown. At Christmastime, when Baoth came home from his prep school, St. George’s, in Newport, Rhode Island, he and his friends traveled on the Fall River steamer. As it came abreast of the Murphys’ apartment they saw that Sara had hung out a sheet from the window with the words “Welcome Home, Baoth” emblazoned on it.