Villa America Read online

  “Oh, dear,” the duchess said as they made their way to the street. “It looks like the nice evening at the theater is going out of style. I suppose we must all adjust.”

  “I thought it was horrifying,” Adeline said, mauve evening bag firmly in hand. “Sara practically took ill.”

  “I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” Hoytie said. “What was that, anyway? Just a bunch of unappealing people in unflattering dress hurling themselves around, as far as I could tell.”

  “That,” Sara said, her breath only now beginning to come easily, “that was new.” At that moment, she felt like she might never sleep again.

  Gerald was lying on the beach in East Hampton at five o’clock in the afternoon watching the September sun illuminate the outline of Sara Wiborg’s legs beneath her white muslin dress, the swell of her breasts stamped against the horizon. The Wiborg women had only just returned from Europe, and Sara, lying on her back, hands under her head, ankles crossed, was talking about London, about the Ballets Russes and art and the people she’d met. He liked the way she recounted things. She didn’t gossip, but neither did she leave out any of the story.

  Earlier in the day, Gerald had driven to the Dunes from Southampton to see the Wiborgs. But really, it was to see her. He’d written to her while she was abroad for the season, but when he was finally confronted with her this afternoon, he found he’d gone quiet. After some fairly formal greetings, Gerald, at a loss, had wandered into the dark-paneled library that looked over the lawn to the sea and carelessly picked out a book. Only when he’d settled in one of the Westport chairs on the terrace did he take in the title: Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt. Not exactly scintillating stuff. He knew he couldn’t very well go back and get another without being noticed, so he pretended to skim through a chapter about the Mammoth Hot Springs. It didn’t matter. His mind, his ears, and even his eyes, when he could manage it, had been on her as she worked only a few feet away in the garden, chatting to her father.

  “What’s this?” She showed her father one of the string beans, running her gloved fingertip along its unnatural curve.

  “Tomato thrips,” Frank Wiborg had said, taking it from his daughter and throwing it into a refuse basket next to him.

  From where Gerald sat, they seemed, at times, to be whispering, but he knew it was just the wind carrying their words away from him. Under the mass of Sara’s hair, moisture gathered at her nape, dampening the starched collar of her dress. After a while, her father had gone inside and she’d looked up to the terrace, unpinning her sun hat. “Shall we go down to the beach for a while?” She’d smiled.

  Gerald knew that if he was considered a natural companion for any of the three girls, it was Olga, the closest to him in age. But it was Sara he’d missed while she was away, Sara he’d longed to talk to. As they lay together now, looking out over the ocean, she told him about the Rite of Spring.

  “I wish I could describe it better, how it made me feel,” she said. “It was so…primitive. No, that’s not it. That makes it sound like it was all chickens pecking at the earth and ugly peasants. It was ugly, but not in any kind of simple way. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

  “Animal,” Gerald said.

  Sara turned onto her side and looked at him, hatless, squinting in the orange blowout of the sun. “Animal?”

  “I mean, maybe that’s what it was. Something that’s primitive, but also…physical.” He didn’t dare say sexual.

  “Yes, that’s exactly it. Animal.”

  He liked how she rolled the word around in her mouth as if that’s what she was doing with it in her head.

  “You should have seen it. You would have understood it.” She settled back again.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding, but really, he was thinking about last summer, when they’d lain on the beach together almost like this, except it was dawn and they had slept there all night.

  It had been after the last of Adeline Wiborg’s summer parties at the Dunes, and Gerald Murphy had come over to be Olga’s date. The three girls had sung and then the evening had grown into night and the rest of the guests had gone home and the family to bed, all except Gerald and Sara and Frank Wiborg. He’d watched as she’d risen from the sofa where they’d been sitting and gone to the window and looked out at the sea, illuminated by a sliver of moon. Then she’d come back and put her hand on Gerald’s shoulder and said: “Let’s go sleep on the beach.”

  He’d nodded, but her father had grumbled, because of course he would have to sleep with them too, on the cold sand.

  They gathered blankets, and Frank took a flask of whiskey and they walked to the edge of the beach grass and lay down, staring up at the stars, cold silver holes in the night sky.

  Gerald didn’t know when he’d fallen asleep, but at some point, he felt dawn light on his face. He’d been aware at the time, through partially closed eyes, that she was watching him. He’d kept still. After she’d gone, he’d stayed awhile, thinking of her. It had moved him, how she’d looked, or rather the knowledge that she was looking. What had she seen? He would have liked to see himself through her eyes, find his own contours. Not the hidden, shadowy ones he tried to keep buried, nor the image reflected in his father’s exasperated and disappointed expression. He’d felt that what she’d seen might be something better, stronger. He couldn’t say why, only that perhaps with her, he was right. The true Gerald Murphy, the one he didn’t even know yet.

  A year had passed since that night, a year since he’d graduated from Yale and started work at Mark Cross. But that other person he longed to see in himself had yet to emerge.

  As Gerald lay on the beach now, a shadow passed over him and he looked up. Hoytie was standing there, a large white hat shading her dark features.

  “Sara,” she said. “Mother’s looking for you.”

  “Oh. What time is it?”

  “Well, I have no idea.” Hoytie looked at Gerald. “Are you staying for supper, Gerald?” She smiled at him.

  When he’d first become acquainted with the family, eleven years before, he’d been as attached to Hoytie as to Sara or Olga. They’d all palled around together, a fourteen-year-old Gerald blushing at Hoytie’s teasing. He knew Hoytie had no real interest in him. She just liked everyone to like her best, to think of her first. He didn’t mind; he found her amusing, but he felt no real closeness to her now.

  “No,” he said. “Father wants me back for supper.”

  “Oh, shame.” Hoytie’s gaze lingered, then she turned her attention back to her sister. “Sara.”

  “Yes, yes,” Sara said, rising and brushing the sand off her dress. She gave Hoytie a little shove as she passed her, and Hoytie stumbled.

  “How…” Hoytie went pink under her hat.

  “Ha,” Sara cried out as she ran up the dunes and onto the lawn.

  Hoytie took off after her.

  Gerald stood, shading his eyes with his hand, watching them push each other as they rushed up towards the house. Two white dresses, two ghosts running up the lawn, their heads inclined as they tried to keep their balance, laughing. Sara’s ungloved hand, suspended in the air like a pale leaf. He had that sick feeling he often got when he watched physical intimacy, an ache in his stomach. Outside looking in. Nose to the glass.

  October came crisp and self-righteously to New York City, and on this Tuesday, Gerald snuck quietly out of the house, a good half an hour early, to walk to work. This allowed him to avoid “going over business” with his father on the twenty-four-block walk from their home to the offices of the Mark Cross Company, a tedious, sour morning ritual that always left him less prepared for the day rather than more. It was something his father had instituted when Gerald’s brother, Fred, started working with the firm, and he continued the habit with Gerald. The truth was that Patrick Murphy liked to harangue his sons bright and early about their lack of business savvy. Fred, quite sensibly, had taken to leaving the house an hour before their father was ready, setting out on foot or in
a taxicab. But Gerald generally felt a curious inability to defy his father’s plans. It was that same inability that had found him, upon his graduation from Yale the previous year, agreeing to work for his father’s leather-goods firm despite the fact that the prospect smelled of death.

  Today, however, Gerald craved the busy, impersonal noise of the pavement. There was a thought that wouldn’t let him go. And although he couldn’t say when it had begun, it had been slowly taking root. It was simple. It was this: Sara Wiborg.

  An early shower had bathed the pavement, which now shimmered pigeon gray and gave off that slightly warm smell of clean tar. Sun hit the windows of Spalding Brothers as he passed, framing Gerald’s reflection against a football jersey and making him think fleetingly and painfully of Yale, of all the ways you were in or you were out.

  In the end, despite a spotty academic record and no sporting talent to speak of, he’d managed to “make it” at Yale. In his senior year, he’d been tapped for the secret society of Skull and Bones, and he’d left college with an eclectic group of friends, some of whom he continued to see in the city. Although, if he were honest, many of those friends—like Cole Porter and Monty Woolley—were considered “too artistic” to be the thing.

  By Forty-Fourth Street, the crush of people hurrying to work—or meetings or appointments with tailors or milliners or great-aunts—grew more dense, as if a great hue and cry of “Upwards, to the destination!” had been heard all around the city, and Gerald was swept along with them.

  At the corner, the crowds relented and he stopped for a moment. He saw the red awnings of Delmonico’s billow like sails in the wind, heard the snap of the canvas in the crosstown breeze. The red like a sash worn by Sara at one of her mother’s evenings. It was all Sara: the smooth marble of the New York Public Library was her forehead; the curve of the colonnade at the Waldorf Astoria, her calf; the elegant automobiles clogging Fifth Avenue, the shape of her spine; the golden yellow of the fallen leaves, the color of her hair.

  Gerald was surprised to find that he’d arrived at the Mark Cross Company. Smoothing down his coat, he entered the building and took the lift up to his office on the third floor.

  A brass plaque attached to his door read Design Manager. It wasn’t a real position, but his father said that was probably fitting. Fred had started out as treasurer, moved up to general manager, and then become secretary. Gerald, as Patrick Murphy often pointed out, was suited to none of these roles. His grasp of business was limited, and he certainly wasn’t experienced enough to be general manager. His father doubted he ever would be. Still, he was insistent that Gerald should blow the cobwebs out of his mind, and he decided on a role that allowed his younger son to think up designs for the company’s new products. There was talk of a safety razor and perhaps some new leather accoutrements.

  After hanging up his coat, Gerald took a pile of drawings from the bottom drawer of his desk and went over them. He loved the beauty and simplicity of the leather and saddlery they commissioned from the factory in England, but his father’s withering criticism made him too embarrassed to show him any of his personal ideas.

  He pulled out his correspondence card and sat idly tapping his pen before setting it to paper.

  Dear Sara,

  I know you are so very busy with all the happy luncheons and teas with the ladies of the large-hatted variety (such wonderful conversation), but I was wondering if I could reserve just one day, Wednesday next, to spirit you around town.

  I opened the newspaper the other day to find that there is a show of Léon Bakst’s prints, his drawings for the Ballets Russes, and thought that of all the people in the world, you must see them in all their Oriental glory, before you see the real thing in India.

  I thought I would make a date for the two of us to sup on Delmonico’s lobster Newberg afterward, because, as we both know, that is what the very best people do after seeing art.

  Will you be tempted? I hope so.

  Yours,

  Gerald

  He reread it, hoping it struck the right note between humor and sophistication. Then, feeling too nervous to delay, he put it into an envelope, rose, and went to the door, calling for the office assistant, Mr. Guise.

  “Please have this delivered to Miss Wiborg.” He looked at the letter again before handing it over. “Her address is on the envelope,” he added.

  He shut the door and sat back down at his desk, only to rise again instantly. He opened the door to call for Mr. Guise, but found the man standing where he’d left him, still holding the letter, a bemused expression on his face.

  “Look,” Gerald said, taking an annoyed tone, “will you please have one of our large drawing cases sent up from the floor and also ask one of the cutters to come to my office.”

  Then he sat and waited. He was setting something in motion and now that it had started, he was impatient that it should all happen at once. The smell of the wet tar outside was still in his nostrils, the impression of everything being connected to itself and to her still fresh in his mind. A soft knock on the door and the cutter arrived, carrying the drawing case. Gerald noticed the man, standing still in the doorway, had exceptionally strong-looking hands.

  “Please, come in. I…I know you must be busy, but this is very important.” Gerald fidgeted, his palms sweating.

  “Sir.”

  “I want this drawing case altered. It’s for a young lady who will be traveling. So.” He opened the case. “I want the backing taken out so it can be rolled up. She doesn’t use paints; these will need to be stitched up into compartments”—he pointed to the spaces reserved for pots—“to make them small enough to hold pencils. Also, the strap. I want a buckle added, to make it more secure. Brass, I think.” He could already see the case in his mind’s eye.

  “Yes, sir.” The cutter hesitated. “I think, though, sir, that the leather will be a little stiff to roll. Would you like me to oil and stretch it?”

  “I see, yes.” He nodded, then looked up: “Thank you.”

  “It’s nothing, sir.” The cutter took the case from Gerald, their hands brushing. Gerald pulled away quickly but couldn’t help watching the back of the man, the softness of his chambray shirt, as he walked away. He seemed purposeful, Gerald thought, comfortable in his own skin.

  Two days passed with no response from Sara. Nothing either at home or at the office. He tried to be nonchalant when asking their maid, Evers, if there’d been anything in the post for him, but she just pressed her lips into a white line and gave a sour “No, Mr. Gerald,” leaving him feeling both sorry and, for some reason, humiliated.

  At dinner, he asked his mother whether she knew if the Wiborgs were in town.

  “I have no idea,” his mother said, “although those awful papers are full of Adeline’s troubles with customs.” She sighed. “Luckily, your father got that Mr. Stanchfield onto it.”

  When the Wiborg women returned from Europe, Adeline had made something of a stink with the customs officials, steadfastly refusing to pay the duty they demanded. She’d swiftly been indicted for smuggling, delighting the tabloid newspapers, which ran lurid headlines about the affair. Gerald’s father had helped with a lawyer.

  Perhaps, Gerald thought now, they’d left the city for a while to avoid the publicity. He was wondering if he should send a letter to Sara at the Dunes when his mother put a hand to her head, as if feeling for an impending headache, and said: “There is something, Gerald, that needs attending. I’d forgotten, because, as you know, I’ve not been well lately.”

  Gerald put down his spoon and looked over his soup at Fred, who gave a small flicker of his eyebrow.

  “Esther and I were asked to attend Mrs. Fallow’s evening of chamber music tomorrow,” his mother said. “But Esther has a poem to finish.” Anna Murphy stopped and stroked his younger sister’s lank hair. Esther took no notice, continuing to scribble in her tattered book, her soup pushed off to one side. “And,” his mother continued, “I must be here to see that she does.”
/>   Esther, Gerald’s sister, was their father’s favorite. She wasn’t a beauty—at fifteen, she was gaining on six feet tall and had a lazy eye. Still, she had been deemed a genius at eleven and had recently begun publishing her poems in some of the best magazines. Their mother understood nothing really of what Esther wrote or said, but she insisted on Esther being her companion through her depressions, under the guise, of course, that she was helping her daughter. Gerald felt that Esther’s formidable brain and patchy attention to her personal appearance were her ways of exerting some form of limited independence, as if her physical and mental geography were the only terrains that she had under her command, and so she would command them ferociously. He loved and admired her for it.

  “So,” his mother continued, “you must go in my stead, Gerald. We really can’t disappoint Mrs. Farrow.”

  The subtext, Gerald knew, was that the Murphys were lucky to be invited at all. Mrs. Farrow was a terrible snob, and while his father could be quite charming when he wanted to be, he still came from modest beginnings, had made his money in trade, and was a Catholic. Three strikes in Mrs. Farrow’s drawing room. And his mother, who distinctly lacked her husband’s charisma, couldn’t stand the stress of the required performance. So he was being sent. It didn’t really matter; he was used to it.

  “Yes, Mother,” he said, but when he picked up his soupspoon again, his appetite had deserted him. He could see Fred smirking into his own supper.

  “Good,” Anna Murphy said vaguely, applying pressure to her temple. Then, after a moment: “Oh, and Fred, you must go too.”

  The next evening was bitterly cold. Fred hunkered down in his coat in the taxicab, sighing, his dark hair combed back from his forehead.

  “Well, this should be a fine time,” Gerald’s brother said. He blew into his collar. “I could be at Delmonico’s instead. Mother and her headaches.”

  The mention of Delmonico’s caused Gerald a small prick of pain. He put it out of his head; she didn’t feel the same, and that was all right. Why should she?