Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill Read Free Book Online Page B

and his daughters. And he complained to his diary frequently about their everyday behavior, of what he saw as their lassitude and fecklessness. “Our girls are so thoughtless and lack foresight utterly,” went one entry.
    If he had paid closer attention, he would have seen that Sara’s behavior, at least, was a rebuke to his criticism. She put in long hours in the garden at East Hampton, trimming and weeding and spraying under the hot sun; she made curtains for the house and tended to ill or injured animals and ran errands for her mother—for between parties and shopping excursions Adeline was increasingly subject to sick headaches and digestive upsets.
    Sara herself wasn’t immune to feelings of frustration and depression, a word that began to creep into her own journal at about this time. But she hid them, as she hid her daredevilry and her disconcerting perceptiveness, beneath a veneer of serenity and compliance. As the eldest Wiborg daughter she was, in a sense, the captain of a team; she had a role to play, and a responsibility to see that the other team members did their part. And although it wasn’t always easy for her to do so, she tried to measure up.
    “This is a word of exhortation from a kind old aunt,” Sara wrote from East Hampton in September 1908 to Gerald, then briefly incarcerated at a cram school called Hargrove in Fairfield, Connecticut, to prepare again for the Yale entrance exams. Her tone was jocular as well as avuncular (“We miss you greatly here, Fat Face”), and why not, as twenty-year-old Gerald was her younger sister’s beau, if he was anyone’s. “Your mother and Fred have absolute faith that you will pass your exams, and if by chance you didn’t, the disappointment would be too cruel. . . . So work all night and every Sunday, for heaven’s sake, rather than miss out again.”
    The Murphys had by now purchased a house called the Orchard in Southampton, East Hampton’s stuffier, grander neighbor, where Patrick could be closer to the Shinnecock National golf links. Fred had graduated from Yale and gone to work with his father at Mark Cross, and the family lunched or dined or played golf with the Wiborgs frequently enough that Sara was well informed about her young friend’s vicissitudes. After graduating from Hotchkiss in June 1907 Gerald still hadn’t been able to meet Yale’s entrance requirements, and had had to take another year of prep school, this time at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. In later life he claimed that the year at Andover was a notion of his father’s by which Patrick hoped to persuade his son to enter Harvard instead of Yale; but it was really an academic necessity. And even this didn’t quite bring him up to Yale’s standard—which is why he had gone to Hargrove for a last-minute grooming.
    When he finally did manage to scrape through, just weeks before the beginning of the fall term, he arrived at a Yale that wasn’t vastly different from the world he already knew. The 407 members of the class of 1912 were predominantly easterners, the bulk of them from New York or Connecticut. Many of them were familiar faces; most of the others would seem that way. Even New Haven’s Romanesque vaults, Gothic towers, and white clapboard houses would have had a certain academic familiarity; and the campus rituals into which he was soon initiated differed only in degree from those at Hotchkiss and Andover.
    On his first evening in New Haven he unpacked his trunk at 266 York Street and went out into a city that had seemingly been taken over by their contemporaries: the restaurants were filled with undergraduates, the streets were crowded with students and hung with banners celebrating the class of 1912. At eight o’clock a parade of Yale men, kept in line by marshals wearing white letter sweaters, marched from Chapel Street to the campus as the band played “March on Down the Field” and the townspeople gawked (and occasionally jeered); when the parade