Edie (4 page)

Henry Dwight Sedgwick (Babbo) and Gabriella May Ladd, on their wedding day, May 18,1953

JOHN P. MARQUAND, JR.
 My great-uncle Harry, whose descendants call him Babbo, and Gabriella had three very happy years together until he died peacefully in 1957 at the age of ninety-five. His funeral was in the winter. The Sedgwick Pie was covered with fresh snow. Gabriella stood there at the grave. She seemed to have envisioned her husband as having been transmogrified into some celestial lamb of God. Gabriella was a pious woman and free of the wry agnosticism of Uncle Harry, for all that he assiduously studied the Bible . . . and in Greek at that. Gabriella believed in heaven and transcendence over evil. As you know, she was really striking-looking . . . eternal youth in her face, those black eyes and that radiant smile. She had on widow’s weeds, which made her look even more ethereal, particularly with the white snowdrifts in the background. I remember she turned to my wife and me: “I was saying to Babbo just the other day”—I would imagine when he was expiring—“’When you get to Paradise, you’re going to
leap
and
leap
and
leap.’
”

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 Gabriella is in the Pie, too. She was cremated, so if s not so easy imagining her rising up and facing the Judge on the Day of Resurrection. I persuaded my sister Kate to help me do something
with Gabriella’s ashes, which made her very nervous when she thought about it. We took half of the ashes and scattered them in the ocean at Singing Beach on the North Shore of Boston. Do you know the beach? it’s called Singing Beach because the sand sings in this strange way under your bare feet when you run across it. Gabriella loved the place. But Kate thought: “What if we really
are
reassembled on the Judgment Day, and part of Gabriella is in the ocean off Singing Beach, and the rest in the ground at Stockbridge?”

JOHN P. MARQUAND, JR.
 There’s stI’ll a little room on the exterior of the Pie for the new generation of the Judge’s descendants. Edie was entitled to be buried there; so is Saucie and so am I. But being only collaterally a Sedgwick, I’ve chosen to be buried in New-buryport. . . . I don’t know what my Sedgwick cousins wI’ll do. Edie’s grandfather, my grandfather, and most all the Sedgwicks of that generation were of an old and vanished school—Stockbridge was their Mecca. They had this place and all the myths and traditions about it which had been cultivated over the years, and the Pie was the greatest of the Sedgwick illusions. Greater even than the illusion that on a summer’s night in Stockbridge the crickets sing Sēdg-wi
k, Sēdg-wi
k.

The four Minturn sisters
(left to right):
Mildred, Edith, Gertrude, and Sarah May (Edie’s grandmother)

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 Stockbridge has always been linked with New York rather than Boston . . . all the connections were up and down the Hudson, by boat or stagecoach or horseback. In comparison, the trip to Boston was long and arduous. So although the men of my family went to Harvard, it was usually New York after college. They went there to work, and many of them married there. Babbo had gone to New York to practice law, and it was there that he met our grandmother, May Minturn.

MINTURN SEDGWICK
 The Minturns were very rich, successful shipping merchants. The swallowtail company flag was seen everywhere—most noticeably on the famous clipper ship the
Flying Cloud,
which my grandfather Robert Bowne Minturn had purchased for $90,000, a colossal sum in those days. The family’s quite proud of the
Flying Cloud.
There’s usually a framed picture of her hanging around somewhere in a Minturn house.

Then, just the year my mother was to have come out in New York with great fanfare, a dishonest agent for the family sugar plantations in Cuba got away with three quarters of a million dollars, which is worth at least three million today. It crippled the firm for a long time. So, as my mother used to say, instead of coming out in satin and pearls, she came out in cotton. I doubt it bothered her. She was an idealistic person, very interested in good works and education.

The clipper ship
Flying Cloud,
1851

Saint-Gaudens’ memorial on Boston Common honoring Robert Gould Shaw (Edie’s great-great paternal uncle) and his black regiment that fought in the Civil War

The family lived near Gramercy Park. My widowed grandmother owned four brownstone houses on Twenty-third Street, forming a sort of Minturn compound in the heart of Manhattan. She was a very domineering lady, a kind of a Queen Bee dowager.

HELEN STOKES MERRILL
 Granny Minturn loved the children. She took such great interest and pride. She pulled out my tooth for me by tying floss silk to the handle and then slamming the door. I suppose I screamed. Well, they were much fiercer then, they really were. I remember my grandmother’s Gramercy Park house, but, curiously, I don’t remember the furnishings except for the white druggets that were put over everything when we went away for the summer to Murray Bay in Canada. They were made of plain cotton or linen, and there was one which fitted the rug perfectly, so that the floor was suddenly white, and there was one for both these sofas, so that the room in the summer, the windows barred shut, was shrouded in white. In winter I remember how dark the rooms were—gas-lit, and when you left the room, you pulled the little chain and that cut the gas down so that there was just a little glow inside the lamp. It didn’t quite go out. When you came in, you pulled the other chain and the light blazed up. It was the latest thing—like what we have now with the rheostat.

Granny Minturn kept a carriage, a coupe a horrible thing. It was enclosed, lined with leather, and you rode backwards if you were little. I got seasick in it. Finally, at the end of her life, she took to hiring a car. She went for drives, always wearing—in such contrast to those widow’s weeds she wore at home—a white, heavily starched muslin cap with little flutings down the side. It surprised me because she had such lovely silver hair. I remember the maid brushing it—the old maid who couldn’t do anything else coming in to brush her hair. It took her half an hour to do it. Her name was Crocksey, just a tiny, wrinkled woman about four feet tall, and we loved her as children because she was about our size.

Granny Minturn’s children—my uncles and aunts—just dropped like flies. A doctor once told me that the corsets of that time had a lot to do with it—they squeezed the vital organs. Granny seemed to be in mourning all the time. She was quite old when I remember her, but she carried herself beautifully and held her head up. By then she had become very tyrannical and high-strung. She had outlived her husband and all but two of her seven children. She stayed in the house and dwelt on the past and her passionate devotion to the dead. She was such a figure of sorrow. She kept a linen-covered table in the corner of her upstairs sitting room with the portraits of her family—so many of them gone—lined up in silver frames. I secretly called it “the dead table.”