“I bet you’re very much looking forward to fielding questions about the finer points of Catholicism from Mrs. Farrow.”
Gerald groaned. “‘Do you think you Catholics will get another saint this year? I hear the pope is just awfully busy.’ ‘What is there to say? One can only pray, Mrs. Farrow.’ God, that woman is a bitch.”
“Well, if they made old New York blue bloods saints, she would consider conversion.” Fred chuckled.
“Maybe I’ll float the idea to her.”
They were silent awhile, then Fred said: “Are you going to this board meeting tomorrow?”
“No,” Gerald said. “I’m just the design manager.”
“Whatever that means.”
“Yes.”
“I envy you, I really do. You don’t have to listen to these bores going on and on or Father telling endless limericks. God, I hate this job.”
Gerald looked at his brother.
“I just keep thinking that there must be something more than this,” Fred said.
It was unusual to hear him speak so openly. It wasn’t that their relationship was strained, exactly. It was more that he and Fred seemed to have an unspoken agreement to keep to certain topics. And those didn’t include honest appraisals of their feelings.
“Yes,” Gerald said, leaning his head back against the seat. “There must.”
Fred clapped his hands together as if to warm them, then looked at Gerald. “Well, what’s wrong with you, then?”
“Nothing,” Gerald said.
“Yes,” Fred said, turning towards him, a knowingness in his eyes. “Oh yes, there is. A girl?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me. A girl?”
“No,” Gerald said, “no girl.”
“Hmm,” Fred said, still regarding him.
“We’re here,” Gerald said, and he pushed the door open before his brother could ask him any more questions.
Mrs. Farrow’s blue silk drawing room was crammed full of hothouse lilies, making Gerald feel as if he were at a state funeral. The sideboard was laid out with sliced veal, jellied salmon, preserved whole fruit, small tender green beans, and a large glistening bowl of grapefruit salad dotted with pimentos. He picked a sherry off a tray and looked for a spot where he might stand unseen while he gathered his strength.
He’d had only a sip from his glass when Fred came up next to him and said: “Let’s just get it over with.” He steered Gerald towards one of the large windows, where their hostess stood, looking like the prow of Nelson’s ship encased in mauve taffeta. She was talking with a gentleman of the same age but slightly less girth.
“Mrs. Farrow,” Fred said, taking her hand. “Our mother sends her regrets. She’s devastated not to be able to be here tonight. I hope we’re not too disappointing as replacements.”
“Lovely to see you both.” Mrs. Farrow turned towards her companion. “Mr. Beardsley, I don’t think you know Fred and Gerald Murphy. Their father is the Mark Cross man, you know, all that lovely saddlery. Patrick Murphy. Do you know him?”
“I don’t believe so.”
They all shook hands, although Mr. Beardsley appeared relieved to have an opportunity to sidle off, which he did fairly smartly.
“I hope your mother isn’t unwell,” Mrs. Farrow said.
“Not exactly in top form,” Fred said.
Gerald, facing the entrance to the drawing room, felt his attention wander to the other guests milling about.
“It’s funny you two should show up at this instant,” Mrs. Farrow continued. “Delphine Conrad and I were just discussing that Saint Rita—Saint Rita, really, too prosaic—that the pope canonized a few years ago. Have you met Mrs. Conrad? Where has she gotten to? Oh, there she is, by the sweet sherry. Well, no matter. Do you know the one I’m talking about, Gerald?”
Gerald felt her hand on his arm and he turned back. “Mrs. Conrad?”
“No, the saint with the funny name. Like a shopgirl. Anyway, apparently she’s the saint of abused wives.” Mrs. Farrow smiled at Gerald and then Fred. “We were saying, Delphine and I, that really, perhaps we could all use a little saint like that.”
Gerald knew Fred was trying to keep from laughing; he could feel him almost vibrating next to him.
“How’s that brilliant sister of yours?”
He didn’t listen to Fred’s response. He was looking across to the doorway where a shape in cream silk was passing, face turned away. He knew that shape: the large breasts, the small waist, and all that hair, the color of aster honey, piled up. She came back and stood, listening to something. She saw him and he saw her. She didn’t smile, and Gerald’s chest felt tight. And then, without realizing that it was going to happen, he said: “Sara.”
“What’s that?” Mrs. Farrow turned in the direction of Gerald’s gaze. “Ah yes, Sara Wiborg. Goodness, is she still unmarried?”
Fred was looking now too.
“You’re quite close with the Wiborgs, aren’t you? They often have you to stay in East Hampton.”
“No,” Fred said tartly. “We visit them, and yes, they are friends. But our father has his own house in Southampton. I believe you lunched with us last summer.”
“Did I?” Mrs. Farrow asked sweetly. “I don’t remember.”
Gerald didn’t care about Mrs. Farrow’s sudden amnesia or Fred’s annoyance or the saint with the name like a shopgirl or any of it; he cared only that she was walking towards them and any second she would be with them.
Her expression was serious until she was about three or four steps away when her face lit up in a smile, like an actress coming onstage. She took Mrs. Farrow’s hand and must have exchanged the usual pleasantries, but Gerald was fixated on her mouth moving, and the words spilling out were meaningless to him. Every moment that she didn’t look at him or speak to him was an agony. He felt like demanding in a loud voice if she’d received his letter, if she gave a damn about him. Instead, he gently clasped his hands behind his back and looked at the floor.
“Gerald?”
He looked up.
“Won’t you take my hand?” She smiled at him. He wondered if it was the stage smile or a real one.
“Of course,” he said. He tried to feel the warmth of her through her glove but felt only the heat of his own hand. Aware of Fred’s gaze on him, he released her.
“I must check that the musicians have everything they need,” Mrs. Farrow said. “We’ll be starting shortly. Sara, do get yourself a sherry.”
“I’ll get it for you, Sara,” Fred said gallantly, leaving Gerald embarrassed for not offering first and alone with the only person he really wanted to talk to.
“How have you been?” Gerald asked, trying to sound as neutral as possible.
“Busy,” Sara said. “There’s this uproar with Mother’s customs.” She colored a bit. “Well…you know.”
“Yes.”
“Your father was wonderful,” she said quietly. “She pleaded guilty in court yesterday. It was actually quite awful…Anyway, this is a dull topic.”
It hadn’t occurred to Gerald that Sara would take such a thing so hard. She’d always seemed impervious to societal judgment of this sort. But of course, reputations were everything. “No,” he said, “I’m the one who’s sorry. My invitation must have seemed so trivial and insulting with everything that’s going on.”
She looked up at him, still a little pink, and said: “No, not at all. It was quite dashing and lovely. I just wasn’t sure if it was out of pity and then things got a bit busy and I didn’t know what to say.”
“It wasn’t out of pity.” He looked at her seriously.
“Oh, no. Of course. Well…”
“Sara, your sherry,” Fred said, joining them. “And Mrs. Farrow has sent word for us to take our seats.”
They stood in the glass-fronted gallery, not speaking. The graceful shapes of Léon Bakst’s Eastern demigods, priestesses, and fairy-tale characters—their pointed toes and voluminous costumes, heavy headdresse
s weighing on slender necks, all colored in indigo and emerald—hung on the white walls before them.
Gerald could hear the sounds of ladies’ shoes and gentlemen’s canes hitting the walnut floorboards, the whispers and occasional giggles as they glanced at the images. Swollen brown bellies and peacock feathers created by a Russian Jew for the holy trifecta of the Ballets Russes: Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Nijinsky. But he and Sara were quiet.
They moved slowly and stopped in front of each watercolor; the other spectators outstripped them and disappeared.
The Blue God was waiting for them at the end. When they drew up in front of him, Gerald heard Sara breathe a little harder, saw her chest rise, all the tiny buttons on her day dress shivering. His own breath seemed caught somewhere in his chest.
The knowing face and cruelly drawn eyebrows, the satyr’s smile. The skin, starting out green like the Atlantic, deepening into an almost black smoothness. The forearm and biceps muscles of a man, but the delicate, elongated fingers of a woman. Male and female in one. Dressed in gold, with pink over the chest where a bosom might have been and balancing on one leg, like a lotus. It was the shape, both powerful and graceful; the watercolor texture of the flesh; but mainly it was the Blue God’s eyes looking directly at you, as if he knew everything, judged everything, was everything.
He couldn’t say why, exactly, but Gerald thought he might cry and was ashamed. As if whatever he saw in the image before him echoed in some secret place in his heart. Then he felt Sara take his hand in hers, clasping it tightly, reaching across the wide black space of all his longing and loneliness.
The Wiborgs had set sail for India in December and the first letter Gerald received from Sara was posted from London, where the family had stopped to spend Christmas. They’d stayed at Belvoir Castle with the Duchess of Rutland, whom Sara seemed to worship, and her daughter Diana, whom she loved. They’d ridden to hounds, she informed him, and dined outdoors, and been forced to eat burning plum pudding at every meal, even breakfast. In short, she’d written him, he wouldn’t believe just how picturesque she’d been. Although Sara mocked the experience, Gerald felt slight panic at the thought of all the things she had done and seen, all the people she knew, that he had not and did not.
Still, the thought of her hand, its pressure in his grasp, pushed him to persevere.
New York
January 1, 1914
Dear Sara,
However picturesque you may have been on horseback, it is nothing compared with the vision I would like to present to you of young Gerald Murphy sitting useless at his large, dust-covered desk at Mark Cross, endlessly trying to make heads or tails out of sums and papers. Sometimes, he even goes so far as to sketch something that will no doubt wind up in a wastebasket hidden in a closet at the farthest end of the building. From there, he may go to Delmonico’s or Rector’s for dinner, perhaps on to the theater, with other equally distinguished young men with whom he will be forced to discuss nothing but sums and papers. Talk about picturesque; it is truly a glorious sight.
Sometimes, just sometimes, he catches a glimpse of a painting illuminated from the inside, the hoof of a horse so shiny it looks like it’s been treated with polish, a woman with heavy hair, pressed in a doorway in the sleet, and is reminded that all is not lost.
Tell me more of your adventures.
Sending love and New Year’s wishes to everyone,
Gerald
Port Said
January 15, 1914
Dear Gerald,
We have reached Port Said, where this letter will begin making its journey to you. Lights, lights everywhere as we crossed that invisible line between Europe and the Orient. The smell of something black and burning—rubber?—fills our nostrils, and while Father complains dreadfully, it excites me. When the sun comes up, what shall we see? Even the air feels different here. I will try to get another letter off before we make for the Suez Canal so that I can sketch these thin lines in.
I’m sure work is a bore, but you must persevere. Your father is wrong about you—you have an eye, Jerry. Laziness is having a gift and not using it. But you are using it.
As for the company you’re keeping, well, it does sound dull. Perhaps some new companions who share your excitement about even the smallest thing are called for.
Hoytie and Olga send their love, as do I,
Sara
New York
February 3, 1914
Dear Sara,
After your last letter, I waited patiently for the suite. I imagined your Port Said full of markets of silk and camels and turbans, covered in a black mist. Sadly, it seems your missive is an orphan.
I don’t know why I can’t get on as other men do. Even Fred, who loathes the work perhaps more than I, seems content to go about his life, while I feel like there must be something out there that I’m missing. Something more…complete. I am going to stop writing. If I go on, you’ll only think of me as weak-minded and complaining.
Somewhat foolishly, but not without fondness,
Gerald
New York
February 15, 1914
Dear Sara,
It is a beautiful, soft day in New York, the kind that mercilessly fools you into believing that spring is just around the corner, and the cherry trees are busily making their buds. Or so I like to imagine.
A woman passed me in Central Park yesterday in a dress nearly the same color those blossoms will be: delicate, warm pink, almost fading to white. As if she herself were spring, or trying to tell me something of it. And I thought: I wish you were here to talk this over with. I can’t very well chat about such a small thing with the men I know without being thought effeminate. About Wilson, Panama, and the Cadillac 1914, yes. But something so slight that weighs so heavily on me afterward, no. Yet you are not here. And I long to know what your eyes are seeing; something brighter and bolder, no doubt.
The Black Service—that darkness that descends on me without warning and that had me in its grip in the last letter—has passed. I can write to you now with a clearer head and, perhaps, clearer intention.
It is as if I have been living in some shell, some prison, that is shaped like the world but is actually some false interpretation of it. There are times I could shake with frustration at not being able to make what I feel inside manifest on the outside. I would give anything to be able to taste and see and feel and show things like other people, but I am held in, somehow.
Write to me of your adventures.
Yours,
Gerald
Jaipur
March 10, 1914
Dear Gerald,
Let us talk of small things, then. I sleep with your beautiful drawing case under my head on trains. So soft, it feels as though it has been thumbed a hundred times. A pillow full of sketches that have you lined in them, not your likeness, of course, but things I think you will understand even if you’ve never seen them before.
And Bombay, not a small thing, but full of the Blue God. Full of Bakst, and thus full of the afternoon we spent together.
Then Jaipur, the Pink City, all rose-colored, indeed bolder than your cherry blossoms, and warmer. Painted pink for the Prince of Wales—imagine such a thing—and the Palace of the Winds, like an intricate wedding cake, built of blushing sandstone. To see it lit just before sunset—it simply glows. Yesterday, we rode elephants, their leathery gray ears softer than you can imagine—softer even than your case—to the Amber Palace, set like some fairy-tale castle high on a hill.
It’s dryer here than Bombay and gives one the impression of truly being lost to the outside world.
You should see this, Jerry. Nothing, not even your Black Service, could reach you here.
Yours,
Sara
Postscript: We have decided to stop in Rome instead of going straight on to Marseille, so send any further post this month to
Palazzo del Grand Hotel
Via Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, 3
Rome
March
20, 1914
Dearest Wayward Jerry,
What can you possibly mean by never writing? You have neglected us shamefully. Olga and Hoytie are reading this over my shoulder with equal indignation, having reminded me this afternoon that the last letter we received from you was as far back as January. Like Phileas Fogg, we have been round the world and return to civilization none the wiser to your doings.
Hoytie says she has heard that you were seen skulking around at a costume ball at the St. Regis, and we would like to know what costume it was you were wearing.
India has been magical, really the wildest success, even if we were accused by the local newspaper in Delhi of singing “coon song snatches”—a very unpleasant way of describing our lovely ragtime medley performance at the Gymkhana Club. Hoytie wants me to tell you that the reaction was “disgusting.” Father felt the music was a poor selection (his words) and remains very huffy about it. Mother, of course, is thrilled.
Do send news.
Love from us all
Rome
March 25, 1914
Dear Gerald,
Please forgive the deceit of the last letter. I know you’ll understand. But, really, what have you been doing? I have been sketching quite a lot. Spring in Rome truly is Jamesian and, after India, feels very false and mannered. I’m pining for the colors—the reds and greens and golds, the pinks and blues—the smell of amber burning and the noise of the market calls. The air was so thick with it, it almost had weight.
In haste,
Sara
New York
April 16, 1914
Dear Sara,
It seems your letters from Rome were much delayed—the slow boat to China perhaps?—so that all three of them, including the one from Jaipur, arrived at once yesterday. It was strange reading them in tandem, like a mask and then the face underneath.
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