Everybody Was So Young (40 page)

After Christmas, showing the strain of her worries about Patrick, Gerald, and Mark Cross, Sara was persuaded to go south to Key West for a brief winter holiday, joined by Ada MacLeish. Both “Dos and Ernest are very anxious for Gerald to come down,” wrote Katy Dos Passos. But Patrick had been running a troublesome fever and the Mark Cross lease negotiation was at a crucial stage, so Gerald stayed behind.

Key West was gay, though unfortunately crowded with what Katy called New Dealers or Old Bohemians, many of them literary groupies hoping to get a glimpse of Ernest, who—with the success of Farewell to Arms and his short story collection Winner Take Nothing—had become a celebrity, and a somewhat self-impressed one at that. (Katy described it as “a tendency to be an Oracle . . . [he] needs some best pal and severe critic to tear off those long white whiskers which he is wearing.”) In fact he had no white whiskers, no beard at all: he still looked like the Ernest of Pamplona and Schruns, a little burlier, perhaps, and needing to wear his glasses more often; but full of fun, always ready to sweep up Pauline or Sara in his arms and swing them around to “You’re the Top” or the new Fats Waller records Gerald had sent. His new boat, named Pilar (Pauline’s code name in the days of their affair), was a real working fishing boat that slept eight, and he and Pauline, the Waddell Girls, and the Dosses took her out almost daily. And the Hemingways’ new house, a big Victorian stucco affair, was grand, with a peacock strutting on the lawn and palm trees all around.

Back in New York, Gerald had had a visit from his sister Esther, who had finally divorced John Strachey in 1933. The marriage was probably doomed from the start: although Strachey had embraced her leftist politics and her money, he had stuck at her drinking, her talkiness, and her lesbianism; and he had maintained throughout his premarital relationship with his mistress, Celia Simpson. As Esther’s sister-in-law, Fred’s widow, Noel, put it, “John was very dishonest with her—and Esther got mad and divorced him and was very sorry, because they had a wonderful mental relationship.” But Esther hadn’t been in love with him. “I don’t think she ever loved anybody,” said Noel, “except at a distance—actresses and so on. And she couldn’t keep house. I went to see them once and it was dreadful—dirty sheets and everything.”

About the closest Esther ever came to a long-term romantic attachment was her friendship with Muriel Draper, the interior designer and estranged wife of the composer Paul Draper. But now, she announced to Gerald over the telephone, she was planning to be married again, to Chester Alan Arthur
III
, a grandson of the twenty-first president who shared her Utopian political ideals and had been a member of the Irish Republican Army. He, too, was divorced. “[A]pparently,” wrote Gerald to Sara, “they’ve both had the same sort of bad time and are most sympathetic. I can’t say I’m sorry because Esther’s life is so dreary. . . . I do hope she gets some happiness out of it. . . . She’s asked me to announce their marriage (at City Hall) in about a month’s time. I think they know what they’re doing.” Whether he gave any thought to the effect of Esther’s sexual preferences on her marriage, whether he thought they even mattered, he didn’t say. In sexual matters, silence, and its cousin denial, were familiar members of the Murphy family.

Most of Gerald’s news, inevitably, concerned Patrick. The boy’s temperature had subsided, but he still could do little more than sketch or fly paper airplanes or listen to the radio, currently a source of considerable stress for him because the airwaves were dominated by news of the trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son. When the guilty verdict was finally handed down it was “an actual relief to him,” said Gerald. “He now avoids any such programmes.” The other children, he reported, were doing well. Baoth had come down with measles, but with his usual resilience he was convalescing in the school infirmary—a jokey letter he wrote was signed “The leaning tower of Baoth.” The only troublesome note was that, as Gerald told Sara, “We are still behind on our bills. . . . Think a long time before you decide to make a gift (45.00 dollars) of the phono [to Dos Passos],—as it looks as if the only actual thing we can cut down for some months is gifts to people. Of course if Dos does seem to lack one,—why—”

About a week after Sara received this letter, Gerald telephoned her in Key West with frightening news: Baoth’s measles had metamorphosed into double mastoiditis, the same potentially fatal infection that had once rushed Fred Murphy to the hospital. Baoth was to be operated on in Boston; Sara would have to leave Key West and join Gerald at once. There was no overland connection to the mainland, and the only way to get there was by car ferry to Havana and thence by air to Miami, a trip that would take at least a day and a half. Instead, that very night, Ernest took her and Ada on board the Pilar, the three of them roaring along the Keys in the darkness; the next morning Ada flew with Sara to Boston. There the worst happened: as a result of Baoth’s surgery, bacteria contaminated his spinal fluid and he developed meningitis, an inflammation of the brain and spinal column which can result in brain damage, blindness, or death.

What followed was, as Esther Murphy described it to Muriel Draper, “ten days of hideous suspense and five operations on the brain entailing the crudest suffering.” Friends and family flocked to Boston—Honoria from Rosemary Hall, Sara’s cousin Sara Sherman Mitchell, Archie MacLeish, Dick and Alice Lee Myers—and Gerald and Sara were comforted to have Edward and Hester Pickman close by on Beacon Street. Significantly Hoytie—whose telegram of the previous summer Sara had come to believe was a curse—was absent. Archie could not stay—his verse play, Panic, a quixotic anticapitalist drama about the 1929 Crash, was to begin a two-night run on March 16 as the first production of the Phoenix Theatre, with Orson Welles in the lead. Ada followed him to New York on March 14, accompanied by Dick Myers, but Alice Lee stayed behind. Finally Baoth’s condition became critical—he was in and out of consciousness and burning with fever—and Gerald, Sara, and Honoria moved into the hospital to be with him. Hester Pickman and Alice Lee joined them. Sara, refusing to believe her boy would not recover, sat by his bedside, holding his hand. “Baoth, breathe,” she said, over and over for four hours, as if she could stave off the inevitable. “Breathe, Baoth. Please breathe.” Over and over—even when, at last, he stopped. It was 10:30 in the morning of Sunday, March 17, 1935, St. Patrick’s Day.

The doctor gave Sara an injection of a sedative and sent her to lie down in another room. Gerald turned to Honoria. “You watch out for your mother,” he told her. “Do not leave her side. Sit by her bed, because when she wakes up and has to face what has happened, it’s going to be rough.” Gerald went to the telephone to call Doctors’ Hospital and break the news to Patrick—who had been told that Baoth was ill but not how seriously—that his brother was dead. On her borrowed hospital bed Sara “slept for an hour or so,” Honoria remembers, “and then she cried and cried.”

“Darlings,” wrote Katy Dos Passos when she heard, “we cannot help you in this disaster but you are so brave you will master it somehow and go on with your good and beautiful lives, so dear to us all.” Dos echoed her: “You’ve been so brave throughout all this horrible time that it seems hard to write that you must go on and be brave.” Even Ernest, who wrote perhaps the kindest and most perceptive letter (“It is not so bad for Baoth,” he said, “because he had a fine time, always, and he has only done something now that we all must do”), fell into the trap: “It is your loss: more than it is his so it is something you can, legitimately, be brave about.” And so did Archie MacLeish, paying tribute to “courage & grace & nobility such as yours,” which, he told them, created “a new justification for all suffering, a new explanation of the mystery of pain.” It was all cold comfort, being brave and wonderful. It would have been better, probably, for Archie to have said to them what he said to the Dos Passoses, that the taking of Baoth, the Murphys’ healthy son, was “fancy. Fancy. There’s no other word for it. They could have thought & thought for a million years & they wouldn’t have been able to think of one like that.”

On March 21 Sara and Gerald wired the Hemingways and Dos Passoses in Key West: “
BAOTHS
ASHES
STAND
ON AN
ALTAR
IN
SAINT-BARTHOLOMEWS
UNTIL
SUNDAY
WHEN
THEY
WILL
BE
LAID
BESIDE
HIS
GRANDFATHER
AT
EASTHAMPTON
OH
THIS
IS
ALL
SO
UNLIKE
HIM
AND
ALL
OF US WE
TRY
TO BE
LIKE
WHAT
YOU
WANT
US TO BE
KEEP
THINKING
OF US
PLEASE
WE
LOVE
YOU
=
SARA
GERALD
.”

In the taxicab on the way to Baoth’s memorial service Gerald broke down for the first and only time, grieving for the moments when he had lost his temper with his high-spirited son. Sara sat in frozen silence, but during the service, unable to bear it anymore, she rushed out onto Park Avenue. Archie MacLeish ran after her. As the two of them stood on the pavement Sara raised her fist to the sky and shook it, cursing God.

They were numb with the shock of Baoth’s death, but, Gerald and Sara thought, they had to keep going for Patrick. (They seem almost to have lost sight of the idea that they had to cherish Honoria, too. “The news,” remembers their godson William MacLeish, “was always about Baoth and Patrick.”) Their friends thought about Patrick, too. Alexander Woollcott had an enormously popular radio show called “The Town Crier,” which every week profiled a different person, usually a celebrity, and played that person’s favorite song. One Sunday his featured personality was someone few in his audience had heard of—Patrick Murphy. After playing his subject’s signature tune, Percy Grainger’s prim little gavotte “Country Gardens,” the Round Table pundit said, over the airwaves, “Good night, Patrick. I hope you’re feeling better.” And Ernest wrote Patrick a wonderful newsy letter about a tuna-fishing expedition he had planned—where he would go, who would be with him, and how he would take films of the expedition and send them. “The difficulty will be,” he said, in one of his man-to-man asides, “to get Dos to take the movies with the camera pointed away from him and toward the tuna instead of away from the tuna and toward him. But he is full of confidence and already thinks of himself as a big camera man and is starting to wear his cap with the visor on backwards.”

Although there had been some thought of taking Patrick out west to Santa Fe or Tucson in hopes of a cure, Gerald and Sara decided on somewhere nearer home, the town of Saranac Lake, New York, where in the 1880s Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau had established a “Cottage Sanatorium” devoted to what he called “the Outdoor Life.” Unlike many tuberculosis treatment centers, Saranac did not have a large-ward hospital; treatment was carried on in “cottages,” or lodging houses, where patients could lead more homelike lives, attended by nurses and visiting physicians. Saranac was located in the Adirondack Mountains, not far from Raquette Lake, where Gerald had gone to stay with the Morgans in the heady days following his secret engagement to Sara. But although there were numerous millionaires’ “camps” on the neighboring lakes, the town itself was no getaway paradise. In the days before antibiotic drugs, Saranac had a population of two thousand actively tubercular people. In addition, hundreds of tentatively cured sufferers remained in the town, and there was virtually no one there whose livelihood didn’t depend in some way on the disease and its treatment.

The success of the tuberculosis industry had led to a turn-of-the-century building boom in the tiny wilderness hamlet, and so the hills around Lake Flower in the center of town were covered by Queen Anne-style frame houses sporting “cure porches,” enclosed glass or open porches for living and sleeping where TB patients could have maximum fresh air and sunlight while being sheltered from the elements. But there was little industry other than the cure, and less amusement. The town was very quiet—even the local radio station went off the air during the two-to-four-P.M. “rest hour”—and, in wintertime, when the wind swept down from the dark Adirondack peaks surrounding it, very cold.

But it was close enough to New York for Gerald to spend time with his family while he struggled to get Mark Cross out of the red, and for Honoria to come for weekends away from school. Sara found a property for rent, called Steele Camp, near the Trudeau Institute on Lower Saranac Lake: a classic Adirondack house made of whole weathered logs with gables and fretwork under the eaves, set in a clearing among enormous old pines and hemlocks, with a detached boathouse and guest quarters across its sloping lawn. The house was full of rather self-consciously rustic touches: one bedroom, which had a screened porch, was paneled in planking made from old railroad ties; others had oak paneling or were walled in barn siding; and the spacious living room, whose windows overlooked the lake and a pair of small islands, had a stone fireplace large enough to stand in. But it was comfortable and had a sandy beach for swimming when the weather got warm enough, and when Patrick’s condition stabilized sufficiently for him to travel he and Sara—and Honoria, who was on her summer vacation—moved in, with Gerald (“the Merchant Prince,” he self-mockingly called himself) making the seven-hour train journey to Saranac every other weekend.

The MacLeishes and John Dos Passos came to visit in July (Katy was in New York on magazine business). Dos had been working on The Big Money, the third novel in his trilogy U.S.A., in which a character named Eveline Hutchins Johnson, who “gives the most wonderful parties,” attended by “all the most interesting people in New York,” and has a “teasing singsong voice” like Sara Murphy’s, swallows a fatal dose of sleeping pills because her life has collapsed from the inside. So Dos was relieved to find “Sara very thin and pretty and in better shape than I expected,” or so he wrote to Ernest. Also in July, after a long silence, the Murphys heard from Fernand Léger, who, ignorant of Baoth’s death, imagined they had been out of touch because of their worries about Patrick. It had been a difficult year for him financially, he said, but he had hopes of an upturn because the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Art Museum planned exhibitions of his work in the fall. All his big canvases would be there, he wrote, and all his friends were telling him he had to go to New York, if only just for the Modern’s exhibition . . . If he could stay with the Murphys on Long Island, he said, he thought he could manage the trip: “Dear Gerald, and dear Sara, do everything in your power to help me with this. If you could advance me 1500 francs . . . you would be my ‘guardian angels’ and I would be your ‘cabin boy’ for all eternity.”