Real Lace (7 page)

As the fictional George Apley in John P. Marquand's novel put it in a letter to his son in New York, “We have our Irish and you your Jews, and both of them are crosses to bear.” In Boston the luckiest Irish, perhaps, were the healthy young women who were able to find jobs as serving girls in the homes of Boston's rich. In those more spacious days, over a century ago, the top floor of every rich man's house was the servants' floor, divided into cubicles where the housemaids slept, and a strong Irish maid would work seven days a week, with time off for six o'clock Sunday Mass, for room and board and as little as four dollars a month. Household service might seem to go against the Irish grain, but it was something these girls could do with a small amount of pride. Their mothers had taught them to cook and wash and sew; they loved children, and made excellent nannies; their Church had taught them orderliness, neatness, honesty, personal cleanliness, and
above all virtue. An “Irish virgin” was certain to remain that way, and it was not long' before every proper Boston home had its “Bridget” in the nursery, the laundry, or the scullery.

To be sure, the servants' floor was dark, lighted only with tiny windows, and a maid's room was barely big enough to hold a single bed and perhaps a dresser, with splintery flooring and, sometimes, a single electric lamp. Plumbing and heating seldom ascended to this level of the house, and each room was provided with a chamber pot. But these girls had other advantages that they were quick to see. They were able to spend their daily lives among gentle, cultivated people, and they were able to observe at first hand the ways not only of the wealthy but of the polite and well-bred. They learned the touch of fine silver and porcelain and furniture, the feel of good linen and real lace. They also learned, from their mistresses, good manners. These were advantages that these girls would do their best to see that their children would have in the next generation.

The Irish, however, never had the security of feeling that they had a friend in court, at the top level of American society. In Boston, they felt particularly abandoned and left to their own poor resources, with only their faith and their Church for comfort. They could draw on no reservoir of automatic sympathy as, paradoxically, could blacks and Jews. This situation, once established, would continue.

Woodrow Wilson, who was President while Ireland was fighting for its independence from England, had no sympathy whatever for the Irish cause. On the contrary, Wilson was an “Orangeman,” a Scotch Presbyterian, and was both anti-Irish and anti-Catholic. Wilson, on the other hand, had great admiration for the Jews, and it was he who appointed the first Jew, Louis D. Brandeis, to the Supreme Court. Some thirty years later in the mid-1940's, when Israel was in similar throes of the fight for independence, both President and Mrs. Roosevelt were hugely sympathetic to Israel's
position, as was Harry Truman, who pushed the motion of independence through the United Nations. But from the beginning of their history in America, the Irish were required to make their way upward aided only by each other.

Why was this? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the thorny Irish “personality,” the Irish orneriness and stubbornness, and unwillingness to bow, scrape, and court favor. The Irish, it might be said, were not “rewarding” victims as were, by contrast, the Negro and the Jew. The masses of Irish immigrants from the famine were clearly poor, but it was difficult to think of them as “deserving” or worthy beneficiaries of care and charity. The Irish might suffer, but they refused to show it, and even the Irish beggars begged aggressively, not obsequiously. It is difficult, perhaps, to want to rescue a porcupine from a trap, or even from an oven, nor is it easy to pity a caged rattlesnake.

All these various and subtle social forces conspired to cause new-rich Irishmen like Judge Morgan O'Brien to congregate at a summer resort in Southampton. Judge O'Brien was quickly followed by his friend Thomas E. Murray, who had been summering in various places such as Far Rockaway and Allenhurst, New Jersey, and who bought himself a large piece of property on the ocean front and started to build an appropriately large house which was to have, among other amenities, two swimming pools—a larger one for the adults and a smaller one for the children. Since the pools were to be filled with salt water from the Atlantic, it was necessary to figure out some way to keep sand from the ocean floor from flowing into the pool with the water, and so, with his stylus on a copperplate, Grandpa Murray invented a filtering system that would do just that. Grandpa Murray also installed a huge telescope on his lawn through which to survey his neighbors, and another chapel.

Not long after Grandpa Murray's Southampton place was finished, his son-in-law, James Francis McDonnell, who had begun
summering with his family in Westchester County, in Rye, New York, waded out into Long Island Sound for a swim and saw something floating in the water that displeased him. He returned to the Rye house and announced—in his imperious fashion—that his family would thereafter also spend their summers in Southampton. The family took over a large section of the resort's Irving Hotel while the McDonnell house was going up hard by the Murrays'. The McDonnell house had over fifty rooms, and was promptly dubbed “the hotel.” Next came two more of Thomas E. Murray's children, his sons Tom, Jr. and John F. Murray, and both acquired large houses in what had become the Murray family compound. Meanwhile, another son, Joseph B. Murray, and a daughter, Julia, who had married Herbert Lester Cuddihy, acquired equally substantial places in nearby Water Mill. Eventually, there were eight houses on perhaps thirty acres of shorefront, plus garages, stables, boathouses, pools, and a polo field.

The Tom Murray, Jr.'s had eleven children, the Jack Murrays had seven, and the Joe Murrays had five. The Cuddihys had seven, and the McDonnells topped all of Grandpa Murray's offspring with fourteen. (The Pope himself, or so went a family joke, had given Anna Murray McDonnell his personal permission to have as many children as she wanted and, because it was the fashion in the 1920's and '30's for pregnant women to pass most of their time lying down, Anna McDonnell spent the better part of fifteen years in bed, while her husband had a “nervous breakdown” with the announcement of each new arrival, as though he had nothing to do with it—and with the prospect of having to make another million dollars in his brokerage business for the new child.) Thomas E. Murray's daughter, Katherine, who married J. Ennis McQuail, also came to Southampton with her more modest quota of two children, and so did another daughter, Marie, who—to confuse things somewhat—had married James Francis McDonnell's brother John, making their two McDonnell children double
cousins of all the other McDonnell children. When President Theodore Roosevelt publicly decried the increasing number of small families among the “best” American family stocks, warning of the dangers of “race suicide,” Grandpa Murray sent Roosevelt a photograph of his own huge clan, to approve of and to autograph. The President returned the picture with his signature.

It was no wonder, however, with this onslaught of Murrays, that Southampton was soon—perhaps spitefully—being referred to as “Murray Bay.” In fact, the only one of Grandpa Murray's eight children who did not join the patriarch in Southampton was brother Daniel Murray, who, after a brief but brilliant career at Georgetown, had fallen from a polo pony, sustained a head injury, and become an incompetent. Whenever Uncle Daniel's face showed up in an old family photograph, and the children asked who he was, they were told, “He died.” He had, in fact, not died, but had been placed at McLean Institute outside Boston, where Grandpa Murray had provided him with a house of his own on the hospital grounds, servants, and a nurse-companion. His brothers and sisters paid him regular visits, but the children were never told of these.

It would be pleasant to suppose that all these relations gathered together along these balmy summer miles of beach would have composed One Big Happy Family, but of course this was not the case. There was constant squabbling within and without this vast—and, by now, quite wealthy—family group. Most of the fights were about money, now that there was so much of it, and these usually centered on the fact that Grandpa Murray's sons, who worked for his companies and other scattered interests, always seemed to have more money than his daughters, who didn't. Thomas E. Murray, Jr. was the martinet of the next generation, and the strictest Catholic, and he was forever lecturing his brothers, sisters, and their respective wives, husbands, and children on what he considered their religious laxity. The children, who resented this, often
gathered on the Southampton streets at night and conducted parodies of the Mass.

The Thomas E., Jr.'s took themselves very seriously and seemed to consider themselves the grandest of the clan. And so the other Murrays enjoyed circulating the frivolous rumor that Uncle Tom had met his wife, who had been a Miss Brady, while she had been doing his laundry. Uncle Jack and Uncle Joe Murray were more outgoing and fun-loving than their more strait-laced brother Tom. Uncle Joe had a particularly jolly nature, and Uncle Jack liked to slip out of church on Sunday morning before the sermon started and head for the golf course. At the same time, some Murrays looked down their noses at Uncle Jack's wife, who had been a model, and who had also been an orphan, and of unknown parentage.

Certain Murrays, in the meantime, tended to look down on the McDonnells as parvenus and upstarts, and it was assumed in the family that the two McDonnell brothers who had married the two Murray sisters had done so only for the Murray money. And once a young Murray child watched, in tears, while two of his older McDonnell cousins entered the house and proceeded to beat up his mother. Comforting the child afterward, his mother said, “Those McDonnells are nothing but stupid Micks—don't worry about it.”

In fact, life was far from harmonious at Southampton. Each of the families had many automobiles, and letting the air out of the tires of cars belonging to their relatives was a popular sport among the children. The McDonnells alone had three sport coupés, five station wagons, three limousines, plus numerous Fords and Chevrolets for the children. One of the McDonnell cars was an exotic Lancia, which, to the nephews' and nieces' great delight, would never work properly, and the children enjoyed chanting over and over “Sell the Lancia” to the tune of “Valencia,” whenever a McDonnell appeared within earshot. Once, for amusement, the
Thomas E. Murray children vandalized the John F. Murrays' boathouse, and Mrs. Murray, who had witnessed the act, complained about it to her brother-in-law. “Nonsense,” said Uncle Tom, “they couldn't have done that. They both received Communion this morning.”

The Cuddihys—Mr. Cuddihy was in publishing—were considered “snooty” and “intellectual,” and were accused of putting on airs about it. A narrow strip of grass separated Uncle Joe's driveway from the Cuddihys' garage in Water Mill, and the Cuddihy children, in their various cars, took to driving casually back and forth over the grass between two trees. One day they discovered that Uncle Joe had placed a length of sturdy wire between the trees, and so they merely detoured between the next two. Presently, Uncle Joe's wire was extended, and then extended again, until the entire strip of grass was barricaded to traffic. Looking at the wire, Mr. Cuddihy said, “I'll tell you what let's do. Let's get all the oldest rags and underwear we can find and hang it up on Joe's clothesline.” This was done, and the garments remained there—with no comment from next door—for several weeks. Finally, when the Joe Murrays were expecting some important guests for dinner, Mrs. Murray called her sister-in-law and said, “Please take your laundry down.”

Uncle Tom Murray, meanwhile, had taken to raising chickens on his place; there were tax advantages to be had if his house could be considered a working farm. The other Murrays took an exceedingly dim view of this, and one morning Uncle Tom was surprised to discover that his laying hens had laid no eggs at all. The culprit was eventually found—a young nephew—leading someone to compose the mocking family rhyme:

Tommy-Tommy Tittlemouse

Stole the eggs from Murray's house,

Hid them in McDonnell's cellar.

Now wasn't he the naughty feller?

The fact that Auntie Katherine McQuail seemed to play a great deal of golf with Monsignor George H. Killeen, the ruddy-faced, heavily jowled pastor of a Southampton Catholic church, was the cause for frequent comment among others in the family. “I'm absolutely sure that golf is
all
that's going on between them,” her relatives said, “even though Father Killeen
does
look a bit like Spencer Tracy.”

In the McDonnell household, Tom, the family chauffeur, was a troublemaker. Once he reported to his mistress that he had seen Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury drive by, and said, “Mrs. Stotesbury has a chauffeur in maroon livery, and a second man ‘on the box'”—i.e., seated beside the driver. Thereafter Tom, too, was accompanied by a footman riding “on the box.” But Tom clearly disliked chauffeuring and, at his urging, little Jim McDonnell one day chased his nurse around the house with an air rifle. The nurse, understandably, gave prompt notice following this episode, and Tom took over her job. The children adored him. The senior McDonnells liked to retire early, but the children would sit up until the wee hours with Tom, in the maids' dining room, reading tea leaves and going over the racing form, picking out winners on the next day's races—for which Tom placed their bets. There was a huge uproar, and a general revamping of the McDonnell household, when it was discovered that the servants, who had gone out weekly with huge shopping lists, had been receiving kickbacks from various Southampton stores.

Still, every effort was made to keep up dignity and decorum, and to maintain a standard of what had come to be known as gracious living. “Always go First Class,” James McDonnell used to counsel his children. “Always be the best at everything you do, and never accept anything that's second-rate.” Everybody dressed for dinner, and little boys were never permitted at the dinner table without a clean shirt, jacket, and tie. Self-improvement was stressed, and a map of the world always hung on the McDonnell
dining room wall, to help the children learn geography. When it was time to move back into the city, and go back to school—the girls to the Sacred Heart, the boys to Georgetown prep—Anna Murray McDonnell, in her continuous state of
accouchement
, always required her children to line up at her bedside each morning for clothing inspection. The little girls always carried rosary beads in their purses, and the boys carried them in their jacket pockets. They were fitted for coats by a man who came to the house from Rowe of London, and the little girls' dresses were hand-made creations by an outfit called Fairyland in Paris, or from a fashionable New York dressmaker named Marcelle Julienne. De Pinna, then a stylish New York clothing store, also received a great deal of Murray-McDonnell-Cuddihy custom for ready-to-wear.