Villa America (7 page)
Authors: Liza Klaussmann
Still, the thought of her hand, its pressure in his grasp, pushed him to persevere.
New York
January 1, 1914
Dear Sara,
However picturesque you may have been on horseback, it is nothing compared with the vision I would like to present to you of young Gerald Murphy sitting useless at his large, dust-covered desk at Mark Cross, endlessly trying to make heads or tails out of sums and papers. Sometimes, he even goes so far as to sketch something that will no doubt wind up in a wastebasket hidden in a closet at the farthest end of the building. From there, he may go to Delmonico’s or Rector’s for dinner, perhaps on to the theater, with other equally distinguished young men with whom he will be forced to discuss nothing but sums and papers. Talk about picturesque; it is truly a glorious sight.
Sometimes, just sometimes, he catches a glimpse of a painting illuminated from the inside, the hoof of a horse so shiny it looks like it’s been treated with polish, a woman with heavy hair, pressed in a doorway in the sleet, and is reminded that all is not lost.
Tell me more of your adventures.
Sending love and New Year’s wishes to everyone,
Gerald
Port Said
January 15, 1914
Dear Gerald,
We have reached Port Said, where this letter will begin making its journey to you. Lights, lights everywhere as we crossed that invisible line between Europe and the Orient. The smell of something black and burning—rubber?—fills our nostrils, and while Father complains dreadfully, it excites me. When the sun comes up, what shall we see? Even the air feels different here. I will try to get another letter off before we make for the Suez Canal so that I can sketch these thin lines in.
I’m sure work is a bore, but you must persevere. Your father is wrong about you—you have an eye, Jerry. Laziness is having a gift and not using it. But you are using it.
As for the company you’re keeping, well, it does sound dull. Perhaps some new companions who share your excitement about even the smallest thing are called for.
Hoytie and Olga send their love, as do I,
Sara
New York
February 3, 1914
Dear Sara,
After your last letter, I waited patiently for the suite. I imagined your Port Said full of markets of silk and camels and turbans, covered in a black mist. Sadly, it seems your missive is an orphan.
I don’t know why I can’t get on as other men do. Even Fred, who loathes the work perhaps more than I, seems content to go about his life, while I feel like there must be something out there that I’m missing. Something more…complete. I am going to stop writing. If I go on, you’ll only think of me as weak-minded and complaining.
Somewhat foolishly, but not without fondness,
Gerald
New York
February 15, 1914
Dear Sara,
It is a beautiful, soft day in New York, the kind that mercilessly fools you into believing that spring is just around the corner, and the cherry trees are busily making their buds. Or so I like to imagine.
A woman passed me in Central Park yesterday in a dress nearly the same color those blossoms will be: delicate, warm pink, almost fading to white. As if she herself were spring, or trying to tell me something of it. And I thought: I wish you were here to talk this over with. I can’t very well chat about such a small thing with the men I know without being thought effeminate. About Wilson, Panama, and the Cadillac 1914, yes. But something so slight that weighs so heavily on me afterward, no. Yet you are not here. And I long to know what your eyes are seeing; something brighter and bolder, no doubt.
The Black Service—that darkness that descends on me without warning and that had me in its grip in the last letter—has passed. I can write to you now with a clearer head and, perhaps, clearer intention.
It is as if I have been living in some shell, some prison, that is shaped like the world but is actually some false interpretation of it. There are times I could shake with frustration at not being able to make what I feel inside manifest on the outside. I would give anything to be able to taste and see and feel and show things like other people, but I am held in, somehow.
Write to me of your adventures.
Yours,
Gerald
Jaipur
March 10, 1914
Dear Gerald,
Let us talk of small things, then. I sleep with your beautiful drawing case under my head on trains. So soft, it feels as though it has been thumbed a hundred times. A pillow full of sketches that have you lined in them, not your likeness, of course, but things I think you will understand even if you’ve never seen them before.
And Bombay, not a small thing, but full of the Blue God. Full of Bakst, and thus full of the afternoon we spent together.
Then Jaipur, the Pink City, all rose-colored, indeed bolder than your cherry blossoms, and warmer. Painted pink for the Prince of Wales—imagine such a thing—and the Palace of the Winds, like an intricate wedding cake, built of blushing sandstone. To see it lit just before sunset—it simply glows. Yesterday, we rode elephants, their leathery gray ears softer than you can imagine—softer even than your case—to the Amber Palace, set like some fairy-tale castle high on a hill.
It’s dryer here than Bombay and gives one the impression of truly being lost to the outside world.
You should see this, Jerry. Nothing, not even your Black Service, could reach you here.
Yours,
Sara
Postscript: We have decided to stop in Rome instead of going straight on to Marseille, so send any further post this month to
Palazzo del Grand Hotel
Via Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, 3
Rome
March 20, 1914
Dearest Wayward Jerry,
What can you possibly mean by never writing? You have neglected us shamefully. Olga and Hoytie are reading this over my shoulder with equal indignation, having reminded me this afternoon that the last letter we received from you was as far back as January. Like Phileas Fogg, we have been round the world and return to civilization none the wiser to your doings.
Hoytie says she has heard that you were seen skulking around at a costume ball at the St. Regis, and we would like to know what costume it was you were wearing.
India has been magical, really the wildest success, even if we were accused by the local newspaper in Delhi of singing “coon song snatches”—a very unpleasant way of describing our lovely ragtime medley performance at the Gymkhana Club. Hoytie wants me to tell you that the reaction was “disgusting.” Father felt the music was a poor selection (his words) and remains very huffy about it. Mother, of course, is thrilled.
Do send news.
Love from us all
Rome
March 25, 1914
Dear Gerald,
Please forgive the deceit of the last letter. I know you’ll understand. But, really, what have you been doing? I have been sketching quite a lot. Spring in Rome truly is Jamesian and, after India, feels very false and mannered. I’m pining for the colors—the reds and greens and golds, the pinks and blues—the smell of amber burning and the noise of the market calls. The air was so thick with it, it almost had weight.
In haste,
Sara
New York
April 16, 1914
Dear Sara,
It seems your letters from Rome were much delayed—the slow boat to China perhaps?—so that all three of them, including the one from Jaipur, arrived at once yesterday. It was strange reading them in tandem, like a mask and then the face underneath.
India—I need more time to respond to what you wrote. It feels as if my head is full of the sounds, the touch of the things you describe so eloquently.
Although you are much missed here, I would not trade places in that Jamesian paradise you find yourself in. Instead, I will await your return, which seems increasingly far off, and content myself with the company of people who eat chicken salad and nod their heads at every piece of wisdom trotted out. My God, this is a bad age for singular thought.
Work is quite busy—with what, I am not entirely sure. If I figure it out, I will write it in my next letter.
Yours,
Gerald
Cannes
May 6, 1914
Dear Gerald,
I am glad spring has finally come to you. Have you seen your cherry blossoms? We have left Rome and are now in Cannes with its extremely muscular casinos. I’ve been wondering about something you wrote to me, a small thing, really, but…
New York
June 1, 1914
Sara,
Your last letter made your absence even keener. Will you not come back…
Deauville
July 6, 1914
Dear Gerald,
It’s strange, how finally your voice, the true one you allude to, has reached me over these thousands of miles and many months. Can it be true…
New York
July 18, 1914
Dear Sara,
I know exactly how you feel. It’s stifling in New York, but all I can think of is that it will be exactly in this kind of weather that you return, and I therefore feel extremely amiable towards it. Still, everything here whispers of your absence. What you said has changed how I see things…
London
July 18, 1914
Dear Gerald,
Your reply has not reached me (and may never, at this rate). But this crossed my mind in the meantime: Will you…
Southampton
England
July 31, 1914
Dear Gerald,
I will be with you before this letter is, but writing about this in my diary doesn’t seem enough. Perhaps things have started to feel unreal unless I tell them to you. All talk is about war, and as we wait for the
Lusitania
to set sail, we have heard rumors that Germany is preparing to enter the dispute over the murdered archduke. Everyone on board is twitchy. We’ve been told that we will be sailing without lights, and the ship’s officers are loading the cruiser guns. She is, of course, a British ship and no one knows where we’ll be in five days, so these are the precautions. I long to read an American newspaper to see where we really stand, but alas, we can’t get hold of anything less than a week old.
Is it really possible for these great old nations to move this fast? Things always seem just that little bit slower in Europe, a little more refined, and yet in four days, it seems as if everything has been thrown up in the air, the music going at a dizzying pace.
I remember once longing for the Ritz to burn. I am sorry for that now. I hope we will get there safely and that yours shall be the first face I see.
S.
The day Owen went up in the flying machine had broken bright and clear over the island. He’d risen far earlier than he needed to, but he’d been waiting for this day for four years. Four years since he’d stolen his first look at her in the barn.
Europe had just declared war on itself and it was all anyone could talk about. Even Mr. Glass. Well, especially Mr. Glass, who last evening, on one of their walks, had spoken only of that, as if the next day they wouldn’t be flying in an aeroplane in the sky.
“Bad business, what’s happening in Europe,” he’d said. “Still, they’re always fighting about something, some small border or other. It’ll be over before you know it. We just have to keep those shipping lines clear and make sure we don’t get dragged into their mess.”
But Owen didn’t care about shipping lines or border disputes in faraway places. All he could think about was that he was finally going to take flight, like the Wright brothers. But he’d tried to nod thoughtfully anyway as they’d ambled through the old cemetery.
They often walked there. Mr. Glass liked looking at the headstones, and also, it wasn’t far from Owen’s farm. It had become a weekly excursion, if the weather permitted. Mr. Glass would drive his motorcar out to the cemetery and he and Owen would walk its perimeter and chat. Sometimes about the farm, what Owen was planting or harvesting, sometimes about Owen’s plans for the future.
In the years since Mr. Glass had come to the island, he’d gained a reputation for being a bit, well, different. He didn’t seem to take any notice of age or station when choosing his friends. On any given evening he was as likely to be found playing cards and talking cotton with Councilman Perry, the second-richest man among them, as he was to be drinking whiskey and discussing infectious diseases (a particular interest) with the old schoolmaster Mr. Cushing.
He was generous with his money, even if, for the most part, he stayed out of local politics. His only real cause, and the only thing Owen had ever heard him be unreasonable about, was what he called sexual vice. As far as Owen could tell, this encompassed any kind of unwedded contact. Mr. Glass could work himself red in the face on the subject of perversion.
Owen suspected it might have something to do with what had become of Mrs. Glass, whom the mainlander never spoke of and whose fate was unknown to the islanders. Other than that one subject, though, Mr. Glass was as kind and warm a man as Owen had ever encountered.
Of all the favors Mr. Glass bestowed, the most unlikely were reserved for Owen, who was far below him in both age and station. Yet Mr. Glass had adopted him, somehow, as his own. There had been many kindnesses over the years: a pair of church shoes at Christmas, books for his birthday (this year, the very funny
Ransom of Red Chief and Other Stories
and the somewhat bewildering
Scarlet Plague
), paying the vet bill when Lettuce’s calf was breech. And no doubt Mr. Glass would have done more if Owen’s mother hadn’t made it clear, through silence and declined invitations, that she didn’t approve.
In the four years Owen had known Mr. Glass, his life had unfolded as anyone might have guessed it would: he went to school until he knew enough to stop and devote himself full-time to running his farm and taking care of himself and his mother. Now, at nineteen, he was strong, tall, and built for labor. He was expected to marry eventually, have children of his own, and teach them how to run the farm. The only unexpected things that had happened to him originated with Mr. Glass.
