Everybody Was So Young (54 page)

In July 1962 The New Yorker published Calvin Tomkins’s profile of the two of them, entitled “Living Well Is the Best Revenge.” Although the piece eloquently evoked the life they had made in Paris and Antibes in the twenties, and portrayed them with affection and sensitivity, neither Gerald nor Sara felt entirely easy about it. Sara disliked the feeling of being transformed into a kind of secondary celebrity, someone famous for knowing famous people. And Gerald objected to the title. For one thing, the “living well” part of it sounded frivolous, as if he were a Lucius Beebe-like bon vivant; for another, he claimed, he had never wanted to have revenge on anyone, for anything. He had in fact mentioned the phrase to Tomkins himself, claiming it was a Spanish proverb, which may have been a typical Murphy improvisation to cover a lapse of memory. For although it sounds like one of Patrick Murphy’s bon mots for a Mark Cross ad, the saying comes from a miscellany compiled by that wisest and most tender of the English metaphysical poets, George Herbert—a miscellany whose first entry reads: “Man Proposeth, God disposeth.”

Earlier that year a film version of Tender Is the Night had appeared, starring Jason Robards as Dick Diver, Jennifer Jones as Nicole, and Joan Fontaine as Nicole’s sister, Baby Warren. The reviews of the film (most of them negative) revived Sara’s feelings of outrage about the book—“so shallow,” she had complained to Calvin Tomkins—and she refused to go see it. So Gerald went alone, to the little movie theater in Nyack. He was the only person in the audience, an experience which, he told Tomkins, “was oddly appropriate somehow to the unreality of the film.” For two hours he sat alone in the dark, watching scenes he had lived being reenacted, sometimes clumsily, by people who bore not the slightest resemblance to the people who had lived them. Increasingly, he must have felt, he and Sara were like ghosts at the feast.

That autumn they had received news that Esther Murphy had died in Paris. She and Gerald had been on cordial if not intimate terms: intimacy, in their family, had always been something to be avoided at all costs, and matters were complicated by Esther’s personal life. There were the two unhappy marriages—Gerald had paid for her divorce, in France, from Chester Arthur, an expensive and complicated proposition—and the relationships with Natalie Barney, Muriel Draper, Mercedes de Acosta, and Sybille Bedford. For Gerald, who had carefully hidden, even from himself, any ghost of sexual ambiguity, her behavior was a rebuke. Then there was her rather manic, unfulfilled brilliance, so uncomfortably similar to, and yet vastly different from, his own unfulfilled painting career: the book, written out in longhand, on Madame de Maintenon, which she never even attempted to have published, although she knew more than anyone in the world about Louis XIV’s famous mistress; the other book, unwritten so far as anyone knew, on her friend Edith Wharton. There were her embarrassing personal habits, about which she remained cheerfully unembarrassed—wetting the bed at night (Sara always made up the guest room with rubber sheets for her), relieving herself, in fact, wherever she happened to be, because it was too much trouble to stop talking long enough to find the bathroom.

She had been in straitened financial circumstances for some time, despite the income from a trust left by her mother and various loans and gifts from Gerald; and she frequently had to ask him for money. “I am sorry to be just another middle aged failure,” she had told him, pitifully, in one such request. Lamenting that “our relationship has ever been plagued by the question of money,” Gerald nonetheless always tried to help, though he insisted that money paid to Esther should come out of his funds, not Sara’s. Her death—alone, far from her family—filled him with regret. As he told Dawn Powell: “It was my irreparable loss not to have been able for reasons of difference in age, location, interests, friends . . . to share more in her life. As a proud older brother—proud of her—I urged her too much to write. She was no doubt not meant to,—but to share brilliantly with others the workings of her mind. I think she took satisfaction in this. I hope so.”

When her ashes were shipped home from France for burial, Gerald paid her the best tribute he could think of, which was to design her memorial stone himself, and to have her laid to rest in the East Hampton churchyard next to Baoth and Patrick.

In that bleak winter when Patrick died, Scott Fitzgerald had tried to comfort Sara and Gerald with his vision of “another generation growing up around Honoria and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail deathward.” With mortality in the air again, the Murphys found enormous satisfaction in their grandchildren, John, Sherman, and Laura Sara, who had been born in 1954, as well as in the grandchildren of friends like the MacLeishes and Myerses. Sara’s relationship with them was serene and comforting, Gerald’s more stimulating: he made up games and virgin varieties of the house cocktail; and he opened their eyes and ears to new things. It was Gerald who, in the early autumn of 1963, called his grandchildren into the living room to show them a record album called “Meet the Beatles”—“grandchildren,” he said, “pay attention. These young men are going to be very, very important.” It was Gerald who read them books by Edward Gorey, Gerald who taught them to swim beyond the treacherous East Hampton breakers, Gerald who told his granddaughter—as she watched him shaving in the morning—never to brush her teeth with her eyes open because it was vain.

Sometimes the games he concocted for them had an edge: on summer nights in East Hampton, Gerald would take the young ones for rides in his black 1955 Pontiac with the searchlight on the roof, telling them ghost stories while they shrieked with laughter and protested that he couldn’t scare them; then he would let them out by the side of the road and drive off. The children, who were dressed in their nightclothes, would laugh, then pretend to be bored, then begin to wonder where he was—and just as they were on the point of actual terror he would reappear as if by magic and they would all pile into the car again, claiming they knew he’d been fooling them.

Usually the entertainments were more benign; if there were no treasure expeditions to deserted beaches, like the one Gerald and Sara had organized so long ago in Antibes, there were picnics on the beach at East Hampton, which Gerald would rake “like a Japanese garden,” says a grandson, or Easter egg hunts at Sneden’s Landing. “Dow was in charge,” remembers William MacLeish of one such party, “and he did everything”—he even made a garland of flowers, like the ones Honoria had worn as a child, for Laura Donnelly to wear in her hair. At the end of the party, when the young MacLeishes were taking their leave, he saluted them by going down on one knee, like a medieval courtier, “his arm out—like that—with that wonderful Mick face.” Says MacLeish now: “and I thought, Ah, Jesus, Murphy, I love you. God, what a man.”

That Easter party was one of the last the Murphys gave at Cheer Hall; in the spring of 1963 they had decided to sell it. Gerald, who had stayed on as president of Mark Cross after the 1948 sale to the Drake America Corporation, had felt increasingly uncomfortable running somebody else’s business, and in 1955 he had decided to retire. So he lost his $35,000 a year salary, and the burden of carrying the mortgage on Cheer Hall was, under the circumstances, considerable. Sara found the house gloomy in the summer, too many shade trees, not enough sun, and they had both felt it had been “a little too much for the past year—slippery road, remoteness, little or no help, etc.” She added, in a letter to John and Betty Dos Passos, “We have always believed it good to leave a place before it leaves you.”

In this case they left it with a farewell fireworks display: two parties for Gerald’s seventy-fifth birthday; in June, a farewell dinner for the Dos Passoses, their little daughter, Lucy, and the Lowndses; and a lunch party for Edmund Wilson, long a friend of Esther’s, intermittently a friend of Gerald’s and Sara’s, and Scott Fitzgerald’s mentor and informal literary executor. Dawn Powell, a particular favorite of Wilson’s, was invited as well, to provide “bufferage,” and someone—Powell? Elena Wilson?—made a caricature drawing to celebrate the occasion. Entitled “Great White Father and friend approach Sneden’s Landing,” it depicts a square-faced, strong-jawed, scowling bald man (Wilson) and a little henlike woman with bangs and a feathered hat (Powell) crossing the Hudson in a rowboat with an American flag on its stern, like Washington crossing the Delaware in Gerald’s least favorite picture.

The menu (inscribed, Wilson noticed, on little porcelain tablets put before each place) was a throwback to another era:

pâté et biscuits

poisson

selle d’agneau

pommes de terre Paillason

purée de petits pois

brioche avec fraises en sirop, crème Chantilly

fromage de Brie

In addition, there were “lots of vins et liqueurs,” reported Sara proudly to Honoria. Unsure of whether they still had the ability to bring off such an occasion, they had hired a chef for the day to help with the cooking. Wilson was suitably impressed—“an incredible meal,” was how he described it—but Gerald worried that they had perhaps gone a bit over the top. “We’ve never done it before,” he reassured Powell anxiously: “and not knowing the W’s really well we didn’t want them to come all that distance for just-steak-and-a-baked-potato. . . . Tell them the whole thing was a ‘
HOMMAGES
A.M. ET
MME
.
BONNIE
VILSON
.’ All through it I kept thinking of the inordinate pleasure I’d had in all the years I was reading his books—all of them. And that’s from the heart.”

26

“Only half a person without you”

ALTHOUGH
BOTH
Gerald and Sara merrily claimed that leaving Cheer Hall made them feel “much more irresponsible than we did when we married in our late twenties,” they felt some ambivalence as well. Gerald joked darkly that he and Sara might just drown themselves in the Hudson so that, like Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, their bodies could be borne downstream to New York on a funeral barge. At least that way they’d avoid clearing out the attics where, he said, “I feel sure I’ll come across the skeletons of our two former selves.”

Indeed there were skeletons aplenty: letters from Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and Katy Dos Passos; Gerald’s painting of the objects in his father’s library, Bibliothèque; table linens from Villa America; and cartons of photographs, which after 1929 Sara had not bothered to paste into albums. Exhuming them, and disposing of them—this piece of furniture to Honoria in McLean, Virginia, that box of photographs to East Hampton—seemed to bring a kind of conclusion. “Every once in a while,” Gerald told Archie MacLeish, “we pull out a drawer and go through our memories of things we did together—we four. What an age of innocence it was, and how beautiful and free!”

Gerald and Sara planned to spend the summer before the move in East Hampton, where they were building a modest house—the first they had ever had constructed to their own specifications. La Petite Hutte stood just behind the dunes on the old Wiborg property, next to the pink stucco garage and chauffeur’s quarters that the Murphys had been using after the sale of Swan Cove and Hook Pond in the 1950s. It was a low building that nestled protectively into its site, and its only extravagant feature was the spacious living room, with its cathedral ceiling, which overlooked the Atlantic; on the other side of the house the view, which could have been painted by Constable, extended over what had been the Wiborgs’ fields to Hook Pond, and beyond to the treetops and steeple that marked East Hampton Village.

While they were still in East Hampton, Gerald had sobering news: his doctor, William Abel, discovered a cancerous tumor in his intestinal tract, which was removed by an operation in August. Gerald was more worried for Sara than anything else; but she and Honoria were both relieved when the operation seemed to be successful and he returned to East Hampton to recuperate. What they didn’t know, but Gerald did, was that the surgery was merely “palliative.” It had been undertaken simply to make him more comfortable, and it was only a matter of time before the cancer would recur, and with it, a lessened chance of survival.

He didn’t tell Sara. Together they had heard hopeless news from doctors too many times for him to inflict more on her now. While he was in the hospital, Sara had written to him from East Hampton, as she had so often done in the days before their marriage when they were separated for a few days. It was a love letter, as those old ones had been, but distilled now to its essence:

Dearest Gerald—

Here I am “at home”—“without you,”—and it is no longer a home, just a place to live—You must know that without you—nothing makes any sense—I am only half a person,—and you are the other half—it is so, however I may try—and always will be—Please please get well soon—and come back to me.

With love—all I have—

Sara

So he went home to East Hampton and spent the Indian summer days “sitting in the sun and gazing out over the Ocean to a featureless horizon” until he had “mended to the doctors’ satisfaction,” as he wrote Archie MacLeish. The phrase was an old one—he had noticed that same “featureless horizon” in Texas when he was stationed there in the First World War. Archie picked up on it at once.

Featureless horizon—yes. That is precisely what one sees from the uninhabited bare hills old men climb to, though only you would think of the just word. But the point is—or at least I think the point is—the horizon, not the featurelessness. When one expects to go on “forever” as one does in one’s youth or even middle age, horizons are merely limits, not yet ends. It is when one first sees the horizon as an end that one first begins to see. And it is then that the featurelessness, which one would not have noticed, or would have taken for granted, before, becomes the feature. . . . So that this featureless sky is as far as it is possible to be from negation. It is affirmation. It says the world is possible to man because to man there are horizons, there are beginnings and ends, there are things known and things unknown.