Everybody Was So Young Read Online Free PDF

most fashionable shopping venue. At about the same time, he met and married a strong-willed, devoutly Catholic young woman named Anna Ryan and was soon the father of a son, Frederic, born in 1885. When Frederic was joined by another son, Gerald Cleary, on March 26, 1888, Anna Murphy, elevating piety over accuracy, changed the little boy’s birth date in her family Bible to March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, and always celebrated his birthday on that date.
    The Murphys didn’t stay in Boston for long. By the last decade of the nineteenth century the self-styled Hub of the Universe had become “a stagnant community” (as Gerald Murphy would later describe it)—a place where “even the [trolley] conductors speak with an educated mispronunciation.” It was also a city deeply divided between the Yankee descendants of the English Puritan settlers and the more recently immigrant Irish, many of whom were peasants fleeing the harsh economic and political conditions of their native land. The Yankees looked down at the Irish: the “Help Wanted” notices in windows and newspapers often bore the line “No Irish Need Apply.” Irish boys didn’t go to Harvard; Irish girls didn’t leave their calling cards in Back Bay drawing rooms. For Patrick Murphy, Boston was not only a small and stagnant pond, it was a restrictive one, and he determined to move to New York.
    He rented premises for the Mark Cross Company (as he had renamed it) on Broadway’s Golden Mile, at Number 253, from Clarence Mackay, the mining millionaire who would later become Irving Berlin’s father-in-law. And he found a modest brownstone on lower Fifth Avenue, in a genteel part of town, to house his family. But Anna Murphy refused to go. Boston was where she lived, and Boston was where she, and her boys, would stay. Patrick Murphy called her bluff: he went anyway. Three weeks later Anna packed and followed.
    Patrick Murphy was a distant, even chilly, father—in fact, recalled Gerald, he avoided all “close relationships, even family ones. He was solitary and managed, though he had a wife and children, to lead a detached life. I was never sure what his philosophy was, except that I recall it to have been disillusioned, if not cynical.” He seemed to think of himself more as a man of letters than a merchant, and he spent his evenings reading the classics—his special favorites were Macaulay and Pascal—alone in his paneled library, with its green-baize-topped table, its globe and bust of Emerson standing guard. Balding and thin-lipped, dressed in sober suits, he looked more like a conservative banker than a fashionable retailer. But he was known to cut loose on occasion. On weekends he was often to be found on the golf course, his pipe clutched between his teeth, a floppy hat protecting his bald pate from the sun; and afterward he liked to celebrate with a libation or two. Edmund Wilson recalled finding him and “some other gray-haired old gentleman,” both of them clearly feeling the effects of several cocktails, “bounding about on the lawn” at a Southampton country club, singing interminable choruses of “Sweet Adeline.” He also possessed an unsuspected talent for clog dancing and for standing on his hands on the arms of a chair.
    During the week, however, he was all business. At Mark Cross, he supplied to America’s rich and nouveaux riches the luxury products enjoyed by the European upper classes: English capeskin driving gloves, Scottish golf clubs, Minton china, pigskin luggage, even the first demitasse and the first thermos bottle ever seen in the United States. He wrote all his own advertising copy: “A woman with a Cross bag wishes to be seen by two people,” went one advertisement, “the man she likes best and the woman she likes least.” A canny phrasemaker, he became a renowned after-dinner speaker at the numerous banquets, often seating up to two thousand captains of industry and commerce, which were a feature of New York’s