All We Know: Three Lives Read Online Free Page A

business, was seldom attributed to them. He was a well-to-do merchant who catered to wealthy New Yorkers, and he was on the board of directors of at least one bank in the course of his career; yet when his speeches were reported in the newspapers, as they often were, he was not identified as the president of Mark Cross. It was important to him and others that he never “appeared the business man.” In the words of one acquaintance, “He looked like a gentleman and he was a gentleman.” The reporter added: “He always carried a cane and gloves.” Membership in the Manhattan, Pilgrims, and Lambs clubs; a move uptown to West Fifty-seventh Street, then to an enormous apartment at 525 Park Avenue; the purchase of a summer house in Southampton and membership in the Southampton Club (of which Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, was president)—all signaled and facilitated his rise.
    And so, as Esther grew up, a number of the “distinguished and remarkable…American women” she knew were members of New York’s elite families. One, Margaret “Daisy” Chanler—broad-minded, kind, and married into the Astor family—was also a sharp analyst of New York society, and her children became Esther’s friends. The travel and political writer Edith O’Shaughnessy—“a clever and ponderous dowager and a great crony of my Ma’s”—was another fixture of Esther’s childhood. But the heroine of Esther’s youth and young adulthood was Edith Wharton. A voracious scholar, largely self-educated, Wharton was at once a serious artist and a commercial success who had also been a pawn in the marriage market. For a bookish young woman who was studying her own awkward social position, Wharton was an inspiration and a caution, and Esther read her closely. In The House of Mirth , Wharton’s first major novel, her protagonist’s failure is one of reputation—the old story. But Wharton also exposes exactly what Lily Bart’s fall has to do with money—with her carefully calibrated yet blind accountings of expenditure and indebtedness—and she shows how a social system that offers meager alternatives to selling oneself in marriage is itself a failure. Through Margaret Chanler, Wharton’s closest friend, Esther eventually met Wharton, and she continued to encounter and admire her as an adult.

    Patrick Murphy (Esther Murphy’s photo album, AFP)
    Despite her father’s delight in her, Esther also grew up with a heightened awareness of her physical and psychological imperfections, just as her brothers had. Fred was diagnosed with mastoiditis and bleeding ulcers as a young man and he had several surgeries when such procedures were extremely dangerous. Gerald suffered from depression, which he called “the Black Service,” and understood himself as having “a defect over which I have only had enough control to scotch it from time to time”—his attraction to men. When he announced his engagement to Sara Wiborg, the daughter of multimillionaire Frank Wiborg, Patrick Murphy castigated him about his poor work ethic and “fail[ure] to grasp the fundamental duty in life, i.e.: self-support,—and financial independence” and told him he “did not deserve to be married.” Esther was an attractive child with long hair and her mother’s wide face, but she did not grow into a beautiful young person; she had no interest in the conventional pastimes of girls of her social class—dancing, clothes, marriage; her enormous height was beyond the pale for a woman at the time; and she had a lazy eye, which heightened the impression of peculiarity. She was conveyed constantly to eye specialists in New York and Europe as a child and had at least one surgery to correct her vision as an adult. It was still ordinary, moreover, for a girl’s scholarship to be seen as freakish and physically destructive. When Esther was eight, a doctor diagnosed her as suffering from “a peculiar form of ‘Hives’” brought on by what he