Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill

Author:Amanda Vaill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

He cannot be such a monster

To his father who tenderly and entirely loves him

But then:

And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished! his offense honesty!

And again:

Is it the fashion that discarded fathers

Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?

His conclusion was bitter:

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.

They kill us for their sport.

Soon after Gerald’s return to Switzerland, Anna Ryan Murphy had a stroke and never recovered her faculties. She died in April; Gerald did not travel back to New York to see her. By then Sara and Honoria were in Antibes, which—after Montana’s “melancholly skenery” and the gray drizzle of Paris in the winter—they found “a paradise: mandarines, lemons, oranges, camellias, anemones, mimosa, & lunch on the terrasse.” Sara made a ceremony of throwing out all the medicines in her traveling case—prematurely, as it turned out, for at the end of March her old gallstone trouble returned and kept her in bed off and on for a month.

She wasn’t too ill, however, to enjoy the arrival of Weatherbird, which Vladimir had sailed from Normandy to Antibes through the Bay of Biscay and the Mediterranean in a series of howling gales. “A thing of great solid beauty” was how Sara described the boat to Gerald: not just seaworthy and sturdy but gracious. The deckhouse had windows on all sides, with benches beneath covered with navy blue cotton, and was spacious enough to accommodate a long table at which everyone could eat above decks, even when the weather was bad. Below decks were the cabins: Honoria’s decorated in pink, Sara’s and Gerald’s in green, another for the boys to share; Vladimir Orloff and a crew of five had quarters on board as well. The saloon, which held four bunks for guests, was also furnished with comfortable upholstered chairs, a long table, and an upright piano, painted white, for convivial evenings. The galley had a refrigerator—Ada MacLeish called Weatherbird a bâteau à Frigidaire—and there was also a bathtub on board, although it was rarely used because it took so much water to fill it.

Gerald and Baoth came down for an inaugural cruise at Easter, but “poor little Pook” had to stay in Switzerland. The doctors felt the air and heat at Antibes would tax his still fragile lungs. “O—I wish I had another sickness!” Patrick lamented to Gerald, in a rare outburst. At last, however, the doctors gave him permission to leave, and in mid-May he and Miss Stewart arrived at Villa America to find the garden alight with lanterns to welcome them.

Finally the whole family was reunited, for—alarmed by the rising tide of Nazi sentiment in Germany, and mindful of their impending departure for the United States—the Murphys had removed Baoth from Rosenheim in March.

The spring and early summer passed in a kind of valedictory haze: there were visits from the Barrys and the Myerses and from Stella Campbell; cruises to Port Cros and St.-Tropez and Portofino; evenings at the casino, where Sara and Gerald took Caresse Crosby; or

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