Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill Read Free Book Online

adorned with comedy masks in different colors (“my mother was so good at that,” said Sara), and there were daisies—Sara’s favorite flower—everywhere. The masked guests, who included the congressman and future presidential son-in-law Nicholas Longworth, were decked out as samurai, hussars, wizards, shepherdesses, and other exotic figures. Sara’s friend Mary Groesbeck “personated crème de menthe or absinthe or something else green and very intoxicating” in a short green dress accessorized with a little tray and a glass of some green liquid.
    Sara herself was, as she put it, “dressed to the teeth” in silver shoes, an eighteenth-century court dress of white brocade whose train could be kilted into panniers for dancing, and a powdered wig crowned with a wreath of daisies. After a ritual unmasking at the midnight supper interval, the lights were lowered and two lackeys in red, white, and gold livery bore a closed sedan chair into the ballroom. Then the lights came up, and Sara stepped out of the sedan chair to wild applause and distributed “lavish and handsome” favors—feather boas, royal insignia, tinsel flowers, cupid’s quivers and bows and arrows, and dog collars and leashes—to her guests.
    A few weeks after this triumphant fantasia, reality blundered in: Sara experienced what she called “the 1st real grief and shock of my life.” She was out with a party of friends in a horse-drawn sleigh, all of them singing and laughing, and her little bulldog puppy was running behind them when a car (“so rare in those parts then”) struck him at an intersection. Sara sprang from the sleigh to cradle the dying dog in her arms; after her companions got them both home to Clifton Avenue she “stayed in [my mother’s] bed weeping for 2 days.”
    That Adeline Wiborg saw nothing odd in taking twenty-two-year-old Sara into her own bed for comfort shows how strong the bond was between mother and daughters. It was a strength as confining as it was comforting. After Sara’s debut it would have been natural for Adeline to relax her hold a little, to encourage this young man or discourage that one, to probe her daughter’s preferences gently in order to gauge the depth of her interest. But Adeline seems to have been blind to the possibility that her daughter could arouse sexual interest in a man, or feel it herself.
    Yet in the two years since she had graduated from Miss Spence’s, Sara had blossomed into a beauty. Her delicate features had lost the blur of late adolescence and acquired a pixieish quality, and her heavy dark gold hair, creamy skin, and mischievous, slanting eyes gave her an air of volupte accentuated by a deliciously ripe figure. Her friend Ellen Barry described her as “very feminine, with a big bust. And she had very pretty legs. She was rather vain about them.”
    She also had a daredevil streak that, according to family legend, compelled her to accompany one of the Wright brothers on a brief exhibition flight (“they told her not to wear a long scarf because it would get tangled in the propellers,” recalled her daughter, Honoria). She loved sailing, and while at East Hampton often went out in Gardiners Bay in the roughest weather. A remarkable photograph of her at this age shows her at the helm of a boat, steering her own course, her eyes narrowed, her lips parted in exhilaration, and her long hair unbound and wild, like a Lorelei.
    She kept her wild side hidden, however, when Adeline swept her off to London in the spring of 1907. “Palatial domicile on opp side is where we expect to be for 2 months,” wrote Sara to Gerald on May 18, in a postcard showing the Hyde Park Hotel. “Hoytie is in her element. . . . Greetings from Little H. & Sara W.” The Wiborgs’ extended stay in this palatial domicile had a specific purpose: Adeline had achieved the considerable coup of arranging to have her two elder girls presented to King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra at Buckingham Palace. For an