Everybody Was So Young Read Online Free PDF Page B

business and social scene. His speaking style was aphoristic, even epigrammatic, like his ad copy: “Give a woman the luxuries of life, she will dispense with the necessities,” he would say; or “Choosing a husband is like choosing a mushroom. If it is a mushroom, you live, and if it is a toadstool, you die”; or “Youth has a faculty of laying up a luxuriant harvest of regrets.”
    He worked at his speeches with at least the same devotion that he gave to Mark Cross. He filled hundreds of small leather-bound notebooks with his own pensées—stream-of-consciousness sequences of ideas and phrases that he would fish in, again and again, for his seemingly spontaneous remarks. “Impromptu speeches are, of course, the best,” he once said; “the great difficulty about them is the committing of them to memory.” He evolved a careful formula: he always insisted on being the final speaker on the roster; he never smiled, and always kept his hands clasped behind his back; he spoke as if to an imaginary (and rather deaf) elderly lady seated in one of the upper ballroom boxes at the old Waldorf-Astoria; and his speeches lasted for no more than seven minutes, with eight more minutes allotted for laughter and applause.
    Clearly this was a man who liked to control his environment, if not dominate it. He “didn’t believe in being sick,” according to his granddaughter, Honoria Donnelly; what he did believe in was physical toughness. He disdained overcoats and the long underwear that made cold winters (and unheated houses) bearable, and he wore summer-weight suits the year round. He thought if you ran into adverse circumstances you should grit your teeth and keep going: one winter afternoon, he and Gerald, aged about ten, were walking by the lake in Central Park when Gerald fell through the ice. Patrick pulled the boy out and insisted that he soldier on, wet clothes and all, until the two of them had finished their walk.
    Anna Murphy was hardly more nurturing. In later life Gerald recalled her as “devoted, possessive, ambitious, Calvinistic, superstitious, with a faulty sense of truth. She was hypercritical and . . . ultimately resigned from most of her friendships.” She was also, at this time, taken up with the care of a new baby, having given birth to a daughter, Esther, in 1898; and she had begun showing evidence of the deep depressions and anxiety attacks that increasingly gripped her as she grew older. Patrick Murphy was finding consolation elsewhere, and not always discreetly. When he took Fred to Atlantic City for some recuperative sea air after a spell of illness, the boy entered his father’s room in the morning only to be greeted by the senior Murphy and a “lady” in a state of some undress. “Oh, this is Miss So-and-So,” explained the patriarch. “We were just looking for her glove.”
    With his parents otherwise occupied, Gerald, a solemn, rather wistful-looking child, was left to the company of his siblings and the ministrations of an elderly nurse who disliked him. His one comfort was a wirehaired fox terrier named Pitz who was his special friend. He used to smuggle Pitz into his bedroom and fall asleep with the little dog clasped in his arms; but Nurse hated dogs, and if, on her nightly inspections, she discovered Pitz in Gerald’s bed, she would snatch him away and lock him in the cellar.
    One winter Pitz was exiled to the yard. Gerald made him a house out of a soapbox and surreptitiously threw towels and blankets out the window so the terrier could drag them into his lair to keep warm; but without human contact the little dog grew wild. In the spring Gerald was allowed to go out and play with him, and picked up a bone for him to chase, but Pitz, thinking the boy was taking it away, snapped at him. The next day Pitz was sent away forever.
    Gerald had been attending Blessed Sacrament Academy, uptown on West 79th Street, where one of his younger schoolmates was Dorothy Rothschild (one day to be Dorothy