Everybody Was So Young (8 page)

The near apotheosis that election to Bones represented had been denied to Fred. “Poor old Fred,” Sara wrote, “I do feel so sorry that he missed it—How much more pleased he will be about you on that account—being a most unselfish person—There is nothing [underlined twice] so ghastly in this world as to feel ‘out of it.’” If Fred was out, Gerald was, by the standards that Yale measured, in: That June he was also elected to a quasi-literary club called the Pundits, for which only five other incoming seniors were chosen; three of them, including his former roommate Larry Cornwall, were new Bonesmen as well. In January of his senior year, despite his rather unspectacular academic record, he was made one of eighteen undergraduate charter members of a new organization, the Elizabethan Club, which had been founded just that autumn to provide “a center for the literary life of the university” (as the Yale Daily News described it). Among the other “men of discriminating tastes and appreciations” on the initial membership list were the university president, Anson Phelps Stokes, and the legendary professor George Pierce Baker, soon to leave for Harvard, where one of his students would be Eugene O’Neill. The Elizabethans’ white frame headquarters on College Street contained First and Second Folio editions of Shakespeare, a copy of the First Quarto edition, and first editions of numerous other Tudor and Stuart writers—certainly a contrast to the macho austerity of the Bones crypt or the big table at Mory’s, where the undergraduates sat around “cussing and drinking lemonade.”

Gerald was also elected manager of the Glee Club, and made a member of the Prom Committee. In the midst of all this extracurricular activity he managed to stage his best academic performance yet, earning a respectable C average (though he came close to failing geology). In February, when his classmates ranked their peers for the class history, Gerald was voted Best Dressed (he got 92 votes, nearly three times more than his nearest rival), Greatest Social Light (he was first of nine, with 58 votes), and Thorough Gent (first of 15, with 55 votes), and he was ranked fourth of ten in the category of Wittiest (Larry Cornwall was the winner). He even got seven votes for Most Brilliant, which would have startled Headmaster Buehler if he learned of it.

But these coups appear to have made little impression on the senior Murphys. Patrick intended that Gerald follow Fred to Mark Cross, and he hoped his younger son would feel more enthusiasm for this task than the elder had. “I am not disappointed in my work for Cross,” he wrote Gerald. “What hurts is that Fred seems to value it so lightly.” Yet he himself put so little value on his younger son’s achievements that he didn’t even feign regret at missing a Glee Club concert Gerald had asked him to attend: “I cannot accept your invitation for March 17th,” wrote Patrick curtly, in a typed letter, presumably dictated to his secretary, from the Mark Cross factory at Walsall, in England, where he was on a business trip. “We cannot arrive until the 17th at the dock.” He gave Gerald an epistolary pat on the back for his solid academic performance in his junior year—“I’m proud of you and your record,” he wrote—but he seemed to take his son’s extracurricular accomplishments for granted.

Inevitably, with so little encouragement from those whose approval he craved, Gerald began to find his Yale successes hollow. “Only in my senior year,” he complained years later, “did I realize how dissatisfied I had been, and how little I had benefitted from my courses.” It cannot have helped that he considered his achievements a kind of camouflage for his true self, a “distortion of myself into a likeness of popularity and success,” as he later put it.

The person who seems to have cheered Gerald’s successes most enthusiastically was Sara Wiborg, but she did so in a sisterly way, playing Jo March to Gerald’s Laurie. Gerald, for his part, spent most of his last year at Yale acting as a kind of courtier to the Wiborg women. He dropped in on them at New Year’s when he returned from his winter Glee Club tour; he took Sara to a Glee Club concert, a John Barrymore play, the
DKE
dance, and—along with Cole Porter—to see Eddie Foy in Over the River; he accompanied Adeline when, terrified by the sinking of the Titanic on April 12, she went to the Cunard offices to cancel the family’s steamship tickets for a planned European trip. But Sara responded to this singular devotion with disarming casualness.

For during the spring and summer of 1912 she was again seeing a good deal of Gerard Lambert. He took her to lunch, went driving with her, took her sailing. Perhaps his attentiveness had something to do with the fact that Ray was again expecting a baby—and then again, perhaps not. The Wiborgs (and the Murphys, who were also friends of the Lamberts) were invited en famille to Gerard’s birthday dinner on May 13; two days later Sara noted the actual anniversary in her diary, “Gerard’s birthday,” underlining it as if it had special significance.

All through the East Hampton summer she played golf or drove or went walking or met visitors’ trains with Gerard. A typical entry in her diary reads:

“Golf with G. [Gerard] and Chesley 10—In bathing—. . . L’s [Lamberts] to lunch—Mother, H. and O. and Hoyt out. To Devon with G, back 4. . . . To Sagaponack with G. to see . . . about cruise—Home 7:30.” As the summer progressed a note of strain crept into her relationship with the Lamberts, and the atmosphere at home worsened as well. Suddenly there were more “very depressed” notations in her diary, and a number of family quarrels broke out.

There was a brief respite in June, in the form of a trip to the Republican Convention in Chicago, where Frank Wiborg was a delegate. Sara was awed by the “terrific crowds—11,000 people in the building”; and she returned to the convention each day, arriving at 10:30 in the morning and staying well into the night. On June 22, despite the forty-five-minute demonstration that had taken place for Roosevelt two days previously, Taft finally prevailed at 9:00 p.m. Olga, Hoytie, and Adeline had all returned to their rooms at the Blackstone Hotel by then, but Sara stayed to the end. She always did love a Scene.

When she returned to East Hampton she fell again into her easy companionship with Fred and Gerald Murphy, who were both frequent summer visitors; and Adeline, possibly relieved to have Sara going about with two blamelessly unattached young men, made no objection. It seems not to have occurred to Sara to play favorites with either, but as the summer went on Gerald contrived, subtly, to tilt things in his favor. Fred was working at Mark Cross—not entirely happily, for his father was an exacting superior—but he escaped to East Hampton on weekends and played golf with Sara, and the ubiquitous Gerard. Gerald, however, had been allowed a summer of leisure before going to work at Mark Cross, and he came to the Dunes almost daily to garden and read aloud with her, accompany her sailing on Gerard Lambert’s boat, the Wild Olive, and act as her partner in winning a “very important [golf] match” on September 17.

One evening, Sara decided it would be fun to camp out overnight on the beach below the Dunes and she persuaded Gerald to join her. Frank Wiborg came along as a reluctant chaperon, and (Sara recalled later) the three of them bundled up in blankets on the sand and “watched very damp clouds go by—for the longest time, across the stars—at an immense distance up—and dew fell on my face and wool cap.” In the morning, when Sara awoke to crystalline sunlight and the cries of the gulls, she found that Frank had decamped to the house and Gerald was still asleep. For a long time—like Psyche and Cupid—she stared at the sleeping youth, thinking how “nice” he was. And then, feeling “awfully embarrassed” and afraid he would wake up and find her watching him, she fled in silence from the beach.

5

“I must ask you endless question”

SO
CUPID
SLEPT
ON, and Sara tried to fill the void in her life with work. During the previous winter she had begun painting with the American impressionist William Merritt Chase in his studio on Fourth Avenue and 25th Street. Now, in the autumn of 1912, she started taking illustration classes with Thomas Fogarty at the Art Students’ League. Her pictures, despite their clear palette and quick gestural shorthand reminiscent of her impressionist models, seem more those of a gifted amateur than the confident handiwork of a finished artist. But she spent long hours painting in the studio and, on weekends, in East Hampton. Certainly this work was more nourishing than another “artistic” venture she was involved in that January: an evening of tableaux vivants in Mrs. Orme Wilson’s ballroom, in which she posed as a portrait by Romney, wearing dull blue with a rose at her bosom, for a charity audience that included such social lights as Mr. and Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan.

Her whole life was beginning to feel like an interminable tableau vivant. She was clearly under stress, suffering from a recurrent eye infection and quarreling with her family (“lunch in family and all fought” was only one such entry in her diary), even lashing out at nice Fred Murphy on at least one occasion (although she made it up with him later).

Whatever her feelings for Gerard Lambert, he was a less frequent presence in her life that winter, and it was Fred who was her nearly constant companion. But when the Wiborgs sailed at midnight on March 4 for their annual trip to Europe, Gerald was the one who saw them off. He was working, without much enthusiasm, at Mark Cross, and participating—without much more enthusiasm—in the social round expected of an eligible young bachelor. He too was increasingly beleaguered by the emptiness of his own family life. Anna was subject to deeper and deeper depressions; Esther worried so about her that she offered to come home from boarding school and take care of her. Fred’s health was frail. And Patrick was frequently absent either physically or emotionally. Sara’s departure clearly shook Gerald, and he looked so bereft at the prospect of parting that Sara remarked on it: “I shall see your saddened face to my dying day,” she wrote him from shipboard. “Such an unwholesome feeling the whole thing had—sickly lights and anoemic confusion and cold relentless machinery. Wasn’t it awful?” She signed the letter “Sal,” which (quoting, perhaps, from a popular song?) had become “pretty Sal” by her next note to him.

After their usual London diet of theater, couture fittings, and parties, the Wiborgs moved on to Paris and then to Italy. Having dispatched Frank to New York to look after business, Adeline swept the girls off to the baths at Terme to recruit their strength for the rigors of the season to come, and then returned to Paris to outfit them at Poiret.

Sara tried briefly to assert her independence by going to study with the fashionable painter Walter Sickert when the Wiborgs returned to London, but it wasn’t a good experience. For Sickert was a notorious ladies’ man as well as a successful artist, and although Sara took the precaution of having her friend Ruby Peto accompany her to Sickert’s Hampstead studio, her second session with the master was a “Dreadful day.” As she recorded in her diary: “Hate man not going back.” Perhaps, as he was known to do with other alluring young women, he chased her around an easel. To judge from her outraged syntax, not to mention her appearance and direct, vivacious manner, the possibility isn’t unlikely.

For the remainder of the summer Sara resigned herself to being one of Mrs. Wiborg’s Three Beautiful Daughters, and playing a supporting role in Adeline’s triumphant season’s finale, a “Vegetable Ball” held at the Ritz Hotel in London on July 24. This party was a kind of high-water mark for American social aspirations in London: among the chic and the aristocratic who joined “the preliminary scrimmage for invitations” (as one newspaper described it) were the duchess of Rutland, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Princess Jane de San Faustino, Lady Cunard (mother of the soon-to-be-infamous Nancy), the Russian basso and society sensation Fyodor Chaliapin, and the duchess of Westminster. Everyone came encrusted with diamonds and draped in pearls, but when it was time for the cotillion, a pseudo rusticity prevailed: Olga and Prince Colonna took the floor, followed by a servant in blackface pushing a wheelbarrow heaped with vegetables which were then handed out as favors. Apparently these Ole Plantation shenanigans sent the glittering company into gales of laughter, which can only have increased during the “ragtime potato-race,” won by Lady Diana Manners, who was dressed for speed in a white ball gown trimmed with panels of red, green, and yellow brocade.

Although this event made headlines on two continents, it barely rated a mention in Sara’s journal: she was much more impressed by two evenings she spent earlier in the week. On July 22, she was introduced to members of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at a party given for them at the Carlton Hotel, at which the young virtuoso Arthur Rubinstein played the piano. And the next night she went to the last London performance of the company’s new ballet, Le Sacre du printemps. The ballet had created a sensation at its Paris premiere in May. Smartly dressed audience members had slapped their hissing neighbors, and a composer screamed for the “sluts” of the sixteenth arrondissement (where many of the wealthy box holders lived) to “shut up.” The cause of this brouhaha was not only Nijinsky’s angular choreography and Stravinsky’s fierce, rhythmic score (which one contemporary observer compared to “the continuous thudding of a savage’s tom-tom”); there was also the ballet’s scenario, in which a young maiden is ritually sacrificed to ensure the coming of spring, a rather unsettling parallel to the female commodity-trading that made dollar princesses out of young women like the Wiborgs. Although the London audience was somewhat less vociferous than the Parisian one, the ballet was performed only three times during the Diaghilev company’s London visit, and it is a mark of Sara’s artistic adventurousness that she saw it at all. As one critic has noted, “musically and choreographically, Sacre bid adieu to the Belle Epoque.” Sara Wiborg, it seems, was ready to do the same.

“It must be wonderful,” Gerald wrote Sara that July, “to be doing so many things that are new to you.” He himself had been having new experiences, but of a grim and anxious sort: shortly after his parents left for a summer in Europe, Fred had come down with mastoiditis, a life-threatening infection of the mastoid bone behind the ear. He was rushed to the hospital for two emergency operations, and there ensued what Gerald described as “a month’s phantasmagoria of hospitals, operations, deliberate doctors, nurses, ether, etc. . . . he came within an hour and a half of losing his mind—or his life,—and his suffering was inhumane.” Gerald, as usual, had been the one to cope with this crisis, moving into the hospital himself to keep watch over his brother. Patrick, on business in England, was “kept informed in detail,” but Anna and Esther, vacationing in Switzerland, were left in ignorance, if not bliss. “I only wish I were 10 years younger and felt well,” Anna sighed in one letter to Gerald.