All We Know: Three Lives Read Online Free Page B

called “intellectual indigestion.”
    By her late teens, she had developed an ironically inflated, self-deflating way of speaking about her body: “My appearance is more than usually attractive owing to the gargantuan proportions of one cheek,” she wrote Gerald. “An ulcerated tooth does not add to one’s attractions.” From the Maine resort where she and her mother stayed in the summer of 1915, she asked him to send her a set of golf clubs, the doctor having ordered exercise. She wanted equipment that was “as light in weight as possible, because although my height might impress the casual observer to the contrary, I am not an Amazon.” Her body and her books were in constant conversation: “I assure you I shall probably be fairly apoplectic with physical well being when I leave here,” she wrote. “I brought with me among my books a new and formidable French biography of the reign of Louis XIII, and so far have only read eight chapters…so you see down what alien byways I have wandered.” Later, some would say that Esther looked like Gerald—only less pretty. “All the masculine traits seem to be concentrated in Esther,” wrote Edmund Wilson, quoting John Dos Passos, “and the feminine ones in Gerald.”
    The message about inadequacy was general in the family; it was an upbringing in which one was encouraged to think of oneself both as exceptional and as a failure. Patrick Murphy sent his sons to Yale, expected them to excel, took it for granted that they would then work for Mark Cross, and gave them executive positions when they graduated, but his dissatisfaction with them was constant. “Come, brace up,” he wrote to Gerald during his second year at Yale. “You can’t afford to let this thing [his studies] go now . It means failure .” Although Gerald never resigned his position on the board of directors of Mark Cross, he stopped working for the company for almost twenty years when he enlisted in the army in 1918. His allergy to his father and to the commercialism of American life propelled him to Europe in 1921, where he spent the next decade, partly in the South of France that he and Sara Murphy helped to popularize, painting, living a carefully arranged life of the senses, and trying to be the kind of father he had not had—funded, of course, by his father and father-in-law’s enterprises.
    Fred, who was Esther’s favorite, worked for the company, then enlisted as a private in the army at age thirty-two, over a doctor’s objections, as soon as the United States entered the First World War. Commissioned as a lieutenant several months later, he fought at the battles of the Somme, Saint-Mihiel, and the Argonne Forest and served as a liaison officer between the French and American armies. He had his thigh shattered by machine-gun fire and his politics radicalized by what he saw on the battlefield, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French. He had dabbled in the theater when he was younger and in 1920 he married Esther’s close friend Noel Haskins, a Park Avenue debutante and trained lieder singer who had acted with the Provincetown Players. For a short time after the war, Fred continued to work for Mark Cross, in New York and England. But his old ailments, war injuries, shell shock, and disagreements with Patrick Murphy about how to run the company soon made work impossible, and he and Noel moved to France. He died in 1924 at age thirty-nine, from complications of his ulcer or his war wound. Six months earlier, the French government had made him a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for his wartime work. He died without being reconciled to his father.
    Just as Patrick Murphy subjected his sons to pressures that he would not have dreamed of imposing on Esther, Anna Murphy made demands on her daughter that she did not make on Fred or Gerald. She had longed for a girl (another child, Doris, had died young) and she was overjoyed when Esther was born. But her dissatisfaction was soon profound