I can’t explain why I didn’t write right away, except that I felt like I couldn’t do anything to make things better, only things that would make it hurt more. Then a year passed, then another. I guess that’s the way these things work.
I’ve heard some of your news from Vladimir over the years and was always happy when it was good.
The thing is, I’m writing now because I saw you. You didn’t see me. It was August, at the casino in Juan-les-Pins. I was having a drink. And you both were there, with Honoria and a tall girl, her friend, I guess.
Sara, you were wearing a black dress like something from the movies, and you were sitting with the other girl, and you gave her your lipstick. She looked very happy about it and put it on. It was the color of those brushfires in the hills we talked about when we first knew each other.
And, Gerald, you were on the dance floor, moving your daughter across it. She looked beautiful, like a woman, and you were talking to her and she was smiling at you. And when you came close to my table, I could hear you say to her: “Keep your hand light on my shoulder. Keep your body light, like you’re treading water.”
I left because I was afraid you’d see me. And because I realized what a coward I’ve been, what a coward I am. You both gave me so much that I will never be able to repay and that I didn’t even try to give back. You even gave me these words, things I would never be able to say, let alone write, if it weren’t for knowing you. I’m sorry. I don’t really know what your life is like now, but you were good and real and very, very much alive in that casino. Whatever’s going on, you’ve survived. And that’s the important thing.
Later, at home, I thought about the times we flew together. And I thought about the happiest time, the trip to Saint-Tropez and the treasure hunt. I won’t say more about that, because I can’t. Besides, sometimes there isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been felt.
I will be leaving Antibes in the spring. My business has all gone back to the bank. It doesn’t matter, because I had it once, and it was good. And I think I might have stayed too long here.
I don’t know if our paths will ever cross again. But my God, I’m glad they crossed at all.
Love,
Owen
1935
Gerald Murphy
539 E. 51st Street
New York
United States
February 1935
Owen Chambers
Chambers Field
La Fontonne
Antibes
France
Dear Owen,
It has taken me a while to be able to reply properly to your letter. Sara and I were both so moved by it and spoke for some time about how much has changed since we were all together and how sad we felt that you watched us from afar and didn’t feel you could come over and greet us.
This is not a reproach, only a meditation on the chasms that have opened in all of our lives. I am so sorry to hear about your business; that is indeed a blow, and I can’t imagine you doing anything else but being up in the sky. That is how I’ve imagined you all these years. The propeller in movement, the roar of the great, precise engine as it started up, the back of your neck, tan, in the sun, as I watched from behind and then made a fool out of myself afterward by overtalking it.
What you said about giving you words—I shudder to think. I wrote you once, many years ago, about how I felt my language was changing because of your influence. Your silent influence, because it was your silence I admired most. But if I have acted on you, if that is what enabled you to write those words, then I am glad.
It is the strange alchemy of two people coming together. When Sara and I began our life together, our marriage was our crowning achievement. How we found each other and knew we should marry is still a wonder to me. But we did. And what resulted—whatever good things we created—had more to do with the alchemy I speak of than with what is deemed a “happy marriage.” Each person changes the other, for good. And then you can’t change back.
Loving Sara changed me, then loving you changed me. But what I never realized, because it had yet to be tested, was that the love for my children changed me the most. It made me vulnerable to life in a way nothing else could, made it so that life could destroy me if it so chose. I do not want you to think there is anything direly wrong with me; I’m all right. I just wanted to explain to you how I think about things these days.
Patrick goes on. For how much longer, I cannot say. This is something that Sara and I do not talk about. She can’t bear to believe that she can’t save him. And her fight is all-consuming. I cannot help her and she cannot help me. I have come to understand that it is only one’s pleasure in life that can be shared. Grief cannot.
The other children are as well as can be asked for. Honoria, as you saw for yourself, is ravishing and a bit rebellious at school (Rosemary Hall). Baoth seems quite pleased at St. George’s, although he is currently suffering from measles, poor fellow. His sense of humor is intact, however. The letter I received from the infirmary was signed “The Leaning Tower of Baoth.”
Sara is in Key West at the moment, getting some much deserved rest with the Hemingways and the Dos Passoses, who are the same. (Did you know Dos got married? I’ve forgotten…)
As for the other parts of our life, the tedium of money and such, well, we’re broke. However, I have (shockingly) managed a coup at Mark Cross; I have taken it over and will be trying to pull it back from the brink of ruin so that both Esther and I may have something to live on. I can’t imagine what my father would say to this.
This brings me to another reason that I am writing to you now. I am leaving for Europe on March 8. I will be coming directly to Villa America, where I’ll stay for a few days before going to London on a trip to see our suppliers.
If you will still be there, I would like to come see your field one last time. I would like to see you, my dear friend, my love. I know it is not possible to bridge the distance that lies between us now, but how I would like to see your face again, to shake your hand. There are so few things that mean anything anymore, but what we had is one of them.
I will be arriving in Antibes on March 14. There is no need to reply to this letter. I will come up to the field. If you are not there, I will understand.
Until we meet again,
G.
P.S.: I don’t know if you’ve read, or even heard of, Scott’s new book Tender Is the Night. It is a curious rendering of our life at Villa America. He says he used much of us in it, although Sara, after reading it, was outraged. For myself, I think there are many good parts in it, and some true things. When I told him this, Scott seemed for a moment like the old Scott, before everything happened to him and Zelda, to us. He gave me that look, the one he used to reserve for Zelda when they were about to do something extraordinary, and said: “Yes, it has magic. It has magic.”
Owen woke up late that morning. He wasn’t sure why; he was always up with the sun. He hadn’t slept well, though. Maybe it was Gerald’s visit. He bathed and went outside. The field was spongy from the rain the night before. It was one of those warm March days on the Riviera when it seemed spring had already arrived.
Eugene was already there, outside the hangar, as usual. He’d put on the gramophone, his second great love, next to airplanes, and was listening to a Mozart piano sonata and smoking a cigarette.
Owen looked up at the sky, clear blue. The soft notes of the music rising and falling in the air. He closed his eyes. Just for a moment. He was late. He’d left a note for Gerald, saying that if he got there before Owen was back, he should wait for him.
She was outside the hangar, patient, still. Just one last time in Arcadia before the Spanish buyer came to collect her. She wasn’t worth much anymore, but she’d do if you needed a plane. And Owen needed to pay Eugene something since the bank had taken everything else.
Owen opened his eyes. He made his way to the plane. Eugene looked skyward.
“I know, I know, I’m late,” Owen said, fasteni
ng his old flight jacket.
He would have talked to her, run his hand down her body, like he used to do. But he was late. He didn’t want Gerald to get the note. He wanted to be there when he arrived. So he pulled down the ladder and climbed into the cockpit.
Eugene began cranking. They didn’t have to call to each other anymore; slight head movements were all they needed, they knew each other so well.
As Arcadia crossed the field, bumping along the track, Owen looked back and waved at Eugene. Then she was off, up into the sky. Her noises, her reactions to his touch, so familiar to him.
The air was colder up here, the softness of the morning lost below. Beneath him, he saw green things beginning to grow again, and he remembered his dream from the night before, which had woken him when it was still pitch-dark and he was alone. The same one. Always the same dream. The wheat, the sun.
He thought of Gerald as he crossed out over the sea. Thought of his face, so loved, his lean body. Thought of the warmth of his hand. There had never been anyone else. There never would be.
Before him, the expanse of blue-gray water disappeared and it all rose up before him, the past. Like the piano music had risen in the air of the field in the warm springlike morning.
Was it because of this that he didn’t hear the changes in Arcadia? Was it that face in front of him, so dear, so lost to him, that kept Owen from realizing that her engine was failing, that he was falling, that his outstretched hand was touching air and not another human being who was reaching for him so clearly in his mind’s eye?
When the plane hit the open water, she broke all up. The fuselage floated a minute, resting on the waves like a bright blue buoy. And then, all at once, what remained of Arcadia and its pilot was gone, sucked down into the sea.
The room at Massachusetts General Hospital was kept dim, because the light made Baoth scream. His body, the body she had made and loved and held, was now smattered with purple welts, his neck twisted to the side, his head covered in bandages from the five brain operations, the seizures that racked him coming without warning, shaking him, until they passed and all that was left were the tears of pain streaming down his face.
Sara held his hand.
“Breathe, Baoth. Breathe.”
There was no sign that he heard her but his will to live came through. And he went on. If she could have breathed her own life into him, she would have. Her child. Fifteen years old and not yet a man. Still had the scent of a boy on him sometimes. And the naughty smile of the child who had played the guitar for her on the terrace of Villa America. That smile, the solid feeling of him when he hugged her hard and then pulled out of her grasp. She could have held him forever.
Disaster had come through the back door while she had been guarding the front. Small and insidious: just measles. Then: just an ear infection, and an operation to relieve the pressure.
Some minuscule bacterial organism, too insignificant to be seen by the naked eye, had snaked its way in, floated on his blood, torn a path straight through her son to his spine and into his brain. Meningitis.
Where had she been? Key West. Taken in the middle of the night to the mainland by Ernest, on the plane with Ada, still unable to believe that what Gerald said could be true. But he hadn’t gotten on the boat to Europe. So she’d known, no matter how much she hated him for telling her, that he wasn’t lying. Because for a moment, she’d hoped he might be.
Baoth could not die. She would not let him die. He would not die.
“Breathe, Baoth. Breathe, Baoth.”
She could feel Gerald next to her. He was quiet. He didn’t say anything to Baoth. He was calm, resigned, as if all this were inevitable. She wanted to scream at him for giving up. She wanted to shake him and call him a coward for laying down his arms so easily.
Honoria was shrinking against the wall. Part of Sara knew it was her job to hold that child as well, but she couldn’t. Not yet. Everything had to go to Baoth. Until he was saved. Until they were all saved from what it would mean to lose him.
Baoth’s face. That face so like her own. Twisted into a silent scream. Why was it so still? Why wouldn’t he look at her? Oh, Baoth.
“Breathe, Baoth. Breathe, Baoth. Breathe, Baoth.”
No one moved. And then Gerald did. Gerald, who had made Baoth too. She felt his hand on her shoulder.
She shook him off. Angry. She put her face into Baoth’s neck, warm. And smelled him. Antiseptic, sweat, decay. She inhaled as deeply as she could and there was, beneath all that, a trace of him, of the living boy.
Another hand on her shoulder, the doctor. He held a needle in his hand.
“Mrs. Murphy.”
She took Baoth’s face in her hands. “Breathe, Baoth, please breathe.”
She felt the shot in her arm, Gerald’s hand still on her shoulder.
Where, she wondered, would all her love go?
WESTERN UNION
TO: ERNEST AND PAULINE HEMINGWAY AND KATY AND JOHN DOS PASSOS
BAOTH’S ASHES WERE LAID TO REST BESIDE HIS GRANDFATHER UNDER THE WILLOW TREE AT THE CEMETERY IN EAST HAMPTON ON SUNDAY OH THIS ISN’T HIM AT ALL THIS ISN’T ANY OF US PLEASE OH PLEASE KEEP US IN YOUR HEARTS WE LOVE YOU
=
SARA AND GERALD
1937
Archibald MacLeish
Uphill Farm
Conway, MA
January 1937
John Dos Passos
571 Commercial Street
Provincetown, MA
Dear Dos,
I heard from Gerald that you stopped by to see them the day after Patrick died. Gerald said he’d been so moved when Sara opened the door to see you there, bags in hand from your recent trip to South America. You said to her: “I just wanted to be with you.”
It is the only thing we can do for them now, and of course you would know that. Just be with them.
I saw them at the house in Saranac Lake shortly before he passed. It was different from the terrible ordeal of Baoth’s hospital death. They were home. Even if it isn’t the home I always imagined them in. And they sat in Patrick’s room, and this time she held one of the boy’s hands and Gerald held the other and they just kept saying to him: “You’re fine, Patrick. We’re right here with you.” Until he went.
What a horror these years have been for them. I can’t help thinking that all that beauty they created under the linden tree can’t begin to make up for what they lost, and it seems, more than anything, a rebuke rather than a consolation.
We have all tried to capture them in our work—you, me, Scott, Ernest. And yet they have eluded us. I think that is because their gift is not one of giving beauty, which might be captured, but of revealing it. Don’t ask me how…
Scott Fitzgerald
Tryon, NC
January 1937
Sara and Gerald Murphy
Camp Adeline
Lower St. Regis Lake, NY
Dearest Sara and Gerald,
The telegram came today and the whole afternoon was so sad with thoughts of you and the past and the happy times we once had. Another link binding you to life is broken and with such insensate cruelty that it is hard to say which of the two blows was conceived with more malice.
But I can see another generation growing up around Honoria and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail deathward. Fate can’t have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these.
The golden bowl is broken indeed, but it was golden…
What Was Found
1928
The Honoria was making her way down the coast. It was midday and they’d already cleared Cannes and were approaching Saint-Raphaël. It was the apex of summer, the heat making the water shimmer, and below them, schools of brightly colored fish, gold and silver and blue.
In the distance, off the starboard side, they could see the Riviera, the craggy cliffs, the flashes of white cove, the scrubby pines, all below a perfect blue sky.
Sara was cranking up the gramo
phone, a Stravinsky record in her lap. Vladimir was at the wheel while Owen and Gerald stood nearby to help the mate, Henri, who’d been hired to crew.
Baoth stood on the port side, his body leaning against the rail, a small, makeshift harpoon held aloft in his hand.
Lying on his stomach on the deck, his chin on the edge, Patrick was counting the fish and keeping a tally.
Honoria sat next to her mother, her head on Sara’s shoulder. When the music started to play, Sara twined her fingers through her daughter’s hair.
“When your father and I were young, this ballet caused a riot in Paris,” she said.
“Why?” Honoria asked, tipping her face towards the sun.
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s hard to explain, but it was new.”
Baoth ran past Owen, knocking him back.
“There’s a big one, maybe a small shark,” Baoth said by way of apology. “He’s gone under us. I might be able to get him.”
“Don’t run on the boat,” Gerald said.
“Dow-Dow, a shark,” Baoth said, exasperated.
“I’ll feed you to the shark if you don’t stop running.”
“I know a story about a big whale,” Vladimir said.
Owen smiled.
“I’ll just bet you do,” Gerald said. “A white whale, by any chance?”
“Ah,” Vladimir said. “I’ve told you this one before?”
“Vladimir, honestly,” Sara said, leaning back, propping her heels against the deck to get sun on her legs. “What are we going to do when they get to school and tell everyone all these stories you’ve ‘made up’?”
“What do you mean, Mother?” Patrick asked. He was like that, always listening while the others were off in their own worlds.
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