Everybody Was So Young Read Online Free PDF Page A

flower beds and the sea.
    Although East Hampton was becoming a watering place for the wealthy, with vast shingled “cottages” arising along its windblown dunes and tranquil saltwater ponds, the vacationing artists had given it a distinctive flavor. An anonymous chronicler of the 1920s described East Hampton society as “based on a community of intellectual tastes rather than a feverish craving for display and excitement,” unlike neighboring Southampton, which this authority depicted as “ruled by the fading remnant of the once all-powerful New York society.”
    Intellectual it may or may not have been, but East Hampton was relaxed, entertaining, and gay. The daughter of one of Sara’s closest friends remembers it as bathed in a kind of perpetual summer light, like a William Merritt Chase painting: “the women all had tiny waists and beautiful shoes, and they wore long fluttering eyelet dresses, and veils on their hats—chiffon veils that tied under the chin—and there was always a breeze.” There were golf games and amateur theatricals at the Maidstone Club, horse shows and dog shows in neighbors’ paddocks, parties on friends’ porches and sloping lawns—and it was at one of these that Sara Wiborg met a boy named Gerald Murphy. He was nearly five years younger than she, Olga’s contemporary more than hers, a brown-haired lower middle former from the Hotchkiss School with a square jaw and diffident manner. Although, or because, he was so clearly not beau material, she was nice to him, drawing him out about school (he was a rather indifferent student), travel (he had been to Europe once as a small boy and longed to go again), his interests (plays, pictures, golf, music), dogs (he loved them but didn’t own any).
    Somehow they hit it off. For Sara, the intense, curious, and admiring boy made an audience at once stimulating and uncritical; for Gerald, the wealthy, well-traveled, beautiful Sara was like a glamorous older sister with whom he could share both his thoughts and his dreams. Soon he was a regular visitor to the Dunes, and even Adeline Wiborg saw nothing to object to about him. He was just a schoolboy, after all, and he had impeccable manners. The girls called him Cousin, and when Sara lectured him about his studies she told him to think of her as “a wise old Aunt.” If she found herself daydreaming about anyone, it was about Gerald’s older brother, Fred, a tall, red-haired, amusing young man who had just graduated from Hotchkiss and would start Yale in the fall. For his part, Gerald spent at least as much time with Hoytie as with Sara—she was, after all, closer in age, and much more possessive.
    Things would change, but so slowly neither of them would know the precise moment when the wind shifted. He knew it first, though. And he set his course, very firmly, on this new tack.
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    “Gerald’s besetting sin is inattention”
    “ GERALD MURPHY’S PARENTS , like Frank Wiborg, came of immigrant stock—but there the resemblance ended. His father, Patrick Francis Murphy, was born in Boston in 1858, the eldest of thirteen children. He attended Boston Latin School, the city’s toughest and most prestigious public school; and when he graduated in 1875, at the age of seventeen, he talked himself into a job with an up-market saddler and harness maker, Mark W. Cross, whose shop on Summer Street was the only one boasting a brick facade. His stated position was salesman, but soon he was forming, and expressing, opinions about the stock: why, he asked Cross, didn’t they try to adapt fine-quality saddle leather, as well as the hand-stitching methods used for harnesses, to smaller personal items like wallets, cases, and belts? Cross took a gamble on his young salesman’s idea, and the result was a trendsetting success.
    When Cross died without heirs, Patrick Murphy bought the company for $6,000, which he borrowed from his father (at 6 percent interest), and relocated it to Tremont Street, then Boston’s