The Late John Marquand

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  For the first few years of John Marquand’s life, particularly those first seven prior to his grandfather’s death, the little family’s existence was comfortable, pleasant, servant-protected, and seemly. There was still all that money in the background. To be sure, there were a number of moves about the American landscape as, in addition to the bond business, Phil’s father tried pointing him in other career directions. After Harvard, Phil had taken an engineering degree at M.I.T., and so there was a period during which he worked as a civil engineer for the American Bridge Company in Wilmington; that was how John Marquand happened to be born there and not—as he often said he should have been born—in Boston. Then there were subsequent moves, first back to Newburyport, next to a house on Pinckney Street in Boston, then to Concord, then to a house at 51 East 30th Street in New York’s fashionable Murray Hill. Then there was a big house on the then-fashionable Boston Post Road in suburban Rye, a house that still stands and has become a nursing home. Rye was a far cry from the split-level, commuter-bedroom town it has become. It was a heavily wooded village of big estates that overlooked Long Island Sound, and among the Marquands’ neighbors were the aristocratic Stuyvesants, Wainwrights, and Roger Shermans.

  The growing-up years in Rye must have been particularly pleasant. Certainly they seemed so in retrospect to John Marquand since, as in any retrospective view, it was always possible to edit the vision, to concentrate on the hours that were comfortable and happy, and to erase from the canvas any ominous storm clouds that may have been gathering on a not-too-distant horizon. There was a big barn behind the house, and a horse called Prince, and a carriage and coachman to drive Phil Marquand, the Westchester squire, to the railroad station in the proper style.

  There was a nurse for little John—no other children to share her attentions—and there was a cook in the kitchen to prepare the meals, a waitress to serve, and a lady’s maid for Mrs. Marquand. There was a man in the garden to rake the graveled walks and driveways and to trim the tall hedges. Automobiles were a rarity in those days, but Phil Marquand had one, a two-passenger Orient Buckboard with its motor placed up behind the driver’s seat. So there were Sunday drives, frightening all the horses along the way as they went, causing the neighbors to look up from their verandas and say, “There go the Marquands!” There were trips to the American Yacht Club to watch the week-end sailing races, or to the beach club for tennis or a swim or a stroll among parasoled ladies who nodded and smiled and acknowledged the attractive family. There was tea with honey in a gazebo, and a sense of gaiety and luxury and permanence that one might easily have supposed would last forever. Phil Marquand was losing money, but there was seemingly a bottomless supply.

  It was an era so recent and yet so far past that it seems quaint in the description. It was a time in which certain things counted, and in which one counted on certain things. It was a period that was very English Colonial in feeling, and where the concept of Society, in the English sense, was not only accepted but stressed. One talked seriously of who the people of Quality were, who were gentry and who were not. Both blood and breeding mattered. Anything English was admired. Harvard was considered socially better than Yale because Harvard was designed along the lines of an English university and laid out in a town called Cambridge along a tree-lined river that looked very much like the Cam. To prepare for Harvard, there was Groton, which had been developed just a few years earlier in an unabashed attempt to copy such English public schools as Eton and Harrow, to educate the sons of American ladies and gentlemen, to sift the gentlefolk from the proletariat.

  Copies of Country Life were placed on bedside candlestands, and English sporting scenes were hung on walls. There were even those people who displayed pictures of the Queen—Victoria, of course—and who gathered their children after meals to sing Kipling verses by the parlor spinet Most important, there were Upper and there were Lower classes, and each class dressed and spoke and acted its part. The maid was called “Mary,” and her mistress was “Madam.” Gardeners doffed their caps and tugged at their forelocks when the Master and the Madam passed grandly by.

  It was in this ambiance that John Marquand spent his early youth—rolling a hoop with a stick, under his Nanny’s attentive eye among the hollyhocks, in a garden where it was perpetually summertime. Or so he later remembered and described it. As he used to say, “I was just a little boy living comfortably with my parents, and the rug was pulled out from under me.”

  The final blow, after losing his Stock Exchange seat, fell upon Phil Marquand half a dozen years later in the financial panic of 1907. As usual, Phil had been heavily “in the market.” But this time his losses were the most grievous they had ever been, and overnight everything was lost. John Marquand was now a slender and handsome boy of fourteen. Already the ways of the rich had begun to hold a special fascination for him. He had been able to study them from two aspects, as an observer and as a participant. But now all at once he could be neither. There could be no more big house in Rye, no more servants, no more Sunday strolls to the beach and the tennis courts, no more of any of the pleasures and pastimes he had learned not only to love but to expect.

  For several weeks after the panic, life was a disheveled affair for the little family as the Marquands tried to reassemble themselves and see where they stood. As usual, when misfortunes of this sort happened, John’s father withdrew into silence, into a kind of towering sulk. “Damn it, I won’t talk about it!” Phil Marquand would say, and that would be that. And so it was time for John’s mother to take over and show her Yankee and Fuller grit.

  It used to be said of Margaret Marquand that she “thought like a man,” and in this case she certainly was required to, for there were a number of manlike decisions to be made. She pointed out to her husband that he still had his engineering degree from M.I.T. and that there were engineering jobs opening up throughout the still-expanding country, particularly in California. Phil would apply for one of these, and Margaret would accompany her husband to the West Coast. Until financial affairs were stable again, young John would go to live with two of his father’s sisters, both maiden ladies, at the old family homestead outside Newburyport, called Curzon’s Mill after John Marquand’s great-grandfather, Samuel Curzon, who had bought the place in 1820. John’s mother took him to Newburyport late in the summer of 1907 and arranged for him to enter Newburyport High School that fall. She then departed to join her husband in California.

  Life at Curzon’s Mill was very different from life in Rye. To begin with, there was the place itself, a forty-seven-acre tract of rolling and lovely though inferior farmland surrounded by groves of birch, oak, and white pine, lying between the tidal washes of the Merrimack and Artichoke rivers. The property consisted of three main buildings, all in a similar state of neglect and disrepair. There was the old gristmill itself, built in 1846 to grind corn with grindstones powered by the rise and fall of the tides on the Artichoke but no longer used except for storage of old family books and papers. There was what was known as the Red Brick House, a house without any great architectural distinction that various Marquand cousins shared during the summer months. Then there was the Yellow House, the pride of Curzon’s Mill. The Yellow House was big and rambling, with eleven bedrooms with huge bay windows that jutted out from one side to overlook both rivers, with a square and stolid center chimney, and doorways hung with wisteria and rambler roses and banked with ancient forsythia bushes. The front part of the Yellow House, in the Federal style, was the oldest and had been built in 1782 as a hunting lodge for a rich man from Marblehead. Later generations had added rooms and ells and gables and porches to the rear. Inside, the Yellow House creaked and sagged and had the old and sleepy smell of more than a century of people who had lived and died there. Rooms opened on other rooms through a pleasant maze of low-ceilinged passageways and narrow staircases with uneven steps connecting areas of the house that had been built on different levels, at different times, for different purposes. There was a backgammon and domino room, f
or example. It was used for nothing else. Over the long and quiet decades, much of the Yellow House had been changed, but much also had remained the same. The Yellow House was not just the pride but the heart of Curzon’s Mill. To Marquands and their scattered cousins, the Yellow House was home.

  In spite of its considerable charm the Yellow House was, like so many old New England places, only moderately comfortable. There were always repairs to be done, and there was hardly ever enough money to do them all. The roof leaked, window frames chattered in the wind, and the caressing limbs of the big oaks and elms around the house loosened shingles from the eaves and bricks from the chimneys. Doors sagged from their hinges, and doorknobs came off in the hand. The house sighed and moaned in the night and, in winter, the winds off the icy rivers were so strong and penetrating that they came up through cracks in the old floor boards, causing scatter rugs to lift and billow in eerie little ripples from the floor. There were certain areas of the house that were impossible to heat, and on winter mornings you would rise, your breath smoking in the air, to find the water pitcher on your dresser frozen solid. Toilets and other plumbing required perpetual attention, and there was never a wall or ceiling that couldn’t have stood a bit of patching or a coat of paint.

  In Wickford Point, John Marquand would use the Yellow House as his model for the main farmhouse, changing the color only slightly to white. Jim Calder, Marquand’s narrator-protagonist in the book, describes the life there this way:

  In those days … we were living on the comfortable tail-end of the Victorian era; but Wickford Point was so far removed from contemporary contacts that much of it was still early Victorian. Life still proceeded in the grooves worn by things which had happened before my parents were born.… My great-aunt Sarah never allowed the two huge brass kettles, used formerly for making soap, to be taken out of the kitchen closet. There was a tinder box on the table in the small parlor with which Aunt Sarah sometimes started the fire, because, she said, the sulphur matches smelled badly and the noise they made was startling. One was always sparing of the matches because they had once been novelties, and when the fires were going we always used paper spills to light the candles. One of the branches of the great elm by the front door was twisted because Aunt Sarah’s mother used to have a pig hung from it in the winter. In the winter, as long as she was able, Aunt Sarah always put a few embers in the warming pan before she went to bed, and made tea from a kettle hung from a crane in the fireplace in the back parlor. She also had a collection of herbs in the long parlor cupboard.

  The quirks and crotchets of the fictional aunts and cousins in Wickford Point are as nothing compared with the eccentricities of the real-life Marquand relatives who actually inhabited the Yellow House. John Marquand’s Aunt Mollie was, for one thing, probably retarded. In the family it was explained that Aunt Mollie was “simple.” But she was a sweet-faced little person who puttered happily about the house, she was inordinately fond of children and young people, and John became devoted to her. Her sister was something else again. Aunt Bessie was a frustrated spinster who was always casting about for new ways to occupy herself, which made her a perpetual troublemaker. Aunt Bessie had been a dedicated Unitarian and at one point had actually gone to divinity school and obtained her degree as a Unitarian preacher. After delivering her first sermon, however, she announced that she had lost her faith. She was an avid reader and a stern disciplinarian; during John Marquand’s long sojourn at Curzon’s Mill, Aunt Bessie required him to listen as she read aloud every play of Shakespeare’s, as well as the Bible from Genesis through Revelation, and all of the classics, along with Scott’s Waverley Novels. Passages from these texts which Aunt Bessie considered particularly worthy or significant, she made him memorize by heart.

  Sharing the Yellow House with these two maiden ladies was a third spinster, their aunt and John’s great-aunt, Mary Curzon. Great-Aunt Mary—the model for Great-Aunt Sarah in Wickford Point—was also an avid reader and considered herself an intellectual. John Greenleaf Whittier had once had a considerable crush on Great-Aunt Mary and had often called on her at Curzon’s Mill. In that Golden Age of New England literature all the greatest lights had been her friends, including Emerson, Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, and Thomas Higginson, the abolitionist. All these were household names at the Mill, and Great-Aunt Mary would speak of Whittier’s or Emerson’s visits as though they had happened yesterday. John Marquand used to recall encountering Aunt Bessie and Great-Aunt Mary one summer evening at Curzon’s Mill walking barefoot in the tall dew-covered grass and conversing animatedly in classic Greek.

  At eighty-five, Great-Aunt Mary had set certain rules. It was she who had established the backgammon and domino room, for example, and she liked to play a game of either after dinner. That meant that someone, often John, was required to play with her. The window shades in the domino and backgammon room had to be set at a certain level, for that was the way they had been set in Great-Aunt Mary’s father’s day. Great-Aunt Mary’s room in the Yellow House was the room in which she had been born. “I was born here, and I intend to die here,” she used to assert. (And die there she did.) Great-Aunt Mary, too, liked to read aloud. Her favorite was Pepys’s Diary; every evening of her long life she read aloud from Pepys’s Diary for three hours before retiring, and everyone, including John, had to listen to these readings. As for conversation, her favorite topic was the Fire. The Fire took place in 1811 and destroyed her grandfather’s house, his wharf, and one of his brigs, the George Washington, which had been docked at the wharf. In Great-Aunt Mary’s opinion, the Fire was the most colorful and important event in American maritime history, eclipsing in significance the Civil War, the War of 1812, and the American Revolution.

  All three aunts were strict, parsimonious, moralistic. They were not only sparing in their use of matches but kept a little box that was just to contain burned-out match ends. The stubs of candles were collected and saved so that they could be melted down and used for sealing wax when the time came to put up preserves. Paper wrappings from packages and parcels were smoothed out, folded, and put aside for future usefulness. Aunt Mollie had a dresser drawer that contained nothing else but buttons by the thousands in every variety of size and shape. John Marquand was once scolded for throwing out the broken half of a pair of scissors, since it could have been put to use as a letter opener. Compared with the easy affluence of the Rye days, this sort of thing must have been painful to endure.

  In the meantime, John was quite aware that both his father’s sisters, Aunt Bessie and Aunt Mollie, had, thanks to their father’s trust, been able to hold onto their money. True, each aunt had an income that amounted only to about $2,000 a year—barely enough to keep Curzon’s Mill going—but still, considering that John’s father had lost his entire capital, it was impossible for John Marquand not to think of himself as very much the poor relation. And at Curzon’s Mill there was always a great deal of talk about money and the lack of it; it took so much, after all, to keep the big old place going. Once during John’s high school days a man pulled up to the Yellow House in a Cadillac and offered to rent the entire place for an enormous sum. That night at dinner there was an excited family conference, and John listened wide-eyed as each aunt outlined what she planned to do with her share of the windfall. Now they would all once again, it seemed, be living like millionaires. Then, shortly after dinner, there was a telephone call saying that the ladies’ prospective tenant had been safely returned to the Danvers State Mental Hospital.

  To make matters seem worse—at least from the standpoint of John’s feelings about his reduced circumstances—the third of his father’s sisters, Margaret, who was called Greta to distinguish her from several other Margarets in the family, had married a man named Herbert Dudley Hale. He was the son of the celebrated Edward Everett Hale, editor and author of over sixty books, the most famous of which was then and still is The Man Without a Country. The Hales were a vast and prolific New England family, and now they were all “connected” wit
h the Marquands. High in the illustrious Hale family tree hung such figures as Edward Everett, orator and statesman, and Nathan Hale, the patriot spy who regretted only that he had but one life to lose for his country. Some of the Hale cousins were certifiably crazy. Others were merely charmingly eccentric. Nearly all the Hales were amusing, if sometimes surprising, company, and Hales were always dropping by for visits at Curzon’s Mill.

  Aunt Greta’s marriage to Herbert Dudley Hale was an imposing union, written up glowingly in society pages all over the country. The Hales moved to New York where, in young John’s view, they lived in grand style. They had six children, and their two oldest boys, Dudley and Russell, were just about John Marquand’s age. They were frequent visitors at Curzon’s Mill, and as John saw them enjoy possessions and luxuries that he could never possibly afford, in his mind the economic disparity between the Hale family and his own grew and became exaggerated to enormous proportions. Actually, the Hales were not rich but merely comfortably off. Herbert Dudley Hale had a small income, and Aunt Greta had, in addition to her share of the Marquand trust, another small inheritance, all of which gave her an income of between $3,000 and $4,000 a year. To young John, this seemed a fortune, and he began to think of himself as a pauper, required to live Spartanly with three dotty old-maid aunts while his Hale cousins lived richly and happily and seemingly without a care in the world.