The Late John Marquand (41 page)

And so, that Friday night, John dined alone with his youngest son, Lonnie, who was seventeen. During dinner John complained that at his age he couldn't eat a thing. A few minutes later he said gloomily that he felt as though he was going to have another heart attack. But Lonnie, familiar with his father's dark moods and his habit of exaggeration, paid little attention when his father talked like this. “It's probably just nerves,” Lonnie said. John then said that he was going straight to bed. He patted Lonnie affectionately on the head and said good night.

In the morning, Floyd Ray, the houseman-chauffeur whose wife Julia served as John's cook and housekeeper, went up at the regular hour with John's breakfast tray. Floyd opened the bedroom curtains and, with the tray in his hands, turned to waken his master. There was a crash that woke Lonnie, and he ran from his room down the hall to his father's room. Floyd was standing there by the breakfast tray that had crashed to the floor. Floyd said, “Your father won't wake up!”

Nor did he. He had died in his sleep early that morning, and his death had a kind of completeness one feels at the end of an interesting book. It was over too soon—sixty-six years is not a long life for a man. And yet John had seen
Timothy Dexter, Revisited
published, that intensely personal project that everyone had assured him would not be successful, but which he had done simply because he had wanted to do it. He was probably “written out” and probably knew it He had got rid of Adelaide, who had become worse than a thorn in the flesh to him. He had made his peace with Harvard. And he had died in the house he had built for himself, in his beloved New England which he himself had helped to create. And so it was over, and his death was another example of fêng-shui, the fitness of things, and a reminder that in the end you always die alone.

Aftermatter

All lives do not end as neatly as well-made novels. Some have loose ends. Some never stop ending. Some, it almost seems, go on too long. Adelaide …

Adelaide insisted on coming up to Newburyport for John's funeral, even though all his friends begged her not to, knowing that he would not have wished her there. But she came, and even as Eddie Goodwin at Curzon's Mill was clearing the underbrush on Sawyer Hill, traditional burying place of Marquands and Hales, Adelaide was trying to take over arrangements. Finally, someone had to remind her, “You are not the legal widow.” Brooks Potter, meanwhile, had earlier received humorous but nonetheless serious and specific instructions from John requesting that a certain Newburyport undertaker, whom John considered a “parvenu,” not be used, and that his grave on the Hill be placed “as far as possible” from the Hales'.

There was a big crowd at the church, and John's old friend Ed Streeter remembers that as he looked around the church it seemed
decidedly familiar to him, even though he knew he had never been inside it before. Then he remembered: He had been in that church before in
Point of No Return
.

Afterward, everyone went back to Kent's Island and gathered there, and drinks were served. At first everyone was solemn and sympathetic, but soon there was laughter and, Ed Streeter recalls, people were saying, “I say, this is a jolly good party, isn't it?” and thinking that John would have approved.

Most shattered of all, perhaps, by the news of John's death was secretary Marjorie Davis, who had told friends that she expected to become the third Mrs. John P. Marquand before long. An autumn “honeymoon” cruise in the Aegean had even been booked and planned. There are several of John's friends, however, who think that something would have prevented him from taking the young woman who had occupied an apartment over his garage into his house. The Greek Island cruise, these friends point out, was to be taken with another couple, and John had traveled with Marjorie Davis before in an unmarried state. Still, John and Brooks Potter, who had married a woman several years his junior and who had become John's close friend during and after the divorce, often talked late into the night of the problems and the rewards of marrying a younger woman.

Carol Brandt received the news of John's death on July 16 in England, when her son telephoned her there. She had gone to England to be married—at her friend Enid Bagnold's house—to a widowed New York lawyer, and her wedding date was just twelve days away. She was to be married to a man of whom John approved, indeed they were friends, and though she was deeply saddened by the news she did not change the date. It struck many people as uncannily coincidental that John should have died just a few days before Carol was due to embark on a new life of her own. It added one more of those odd fictive notes to John's life. The year 1960, though it marked the beginning of a happy new marriage, was also a year of loss for Carol. That Thanksgiving, her daughter Vicki was killed in a plane piloted by her husband, a French aviator. It crashed while they were bound for the Bahamas and a holiday.

John's will, when it was read, seemed a rather harsh one. After certain specific bequests to servants and secretaries, three quarters
of the residue of the estate went to his daughter Christina and one fourth to John, Jr., with the will saying that the “unequal division was not intended in any way to reflect a difference in my affection for them,” but “my daughter is and always will be in greater need of assistance than my son John.” No money at all went to his children by Adelaide, though they were bequeathed the house at Kent's Island. Adelaide's money, after all, had helped turn Kent's Island into the showplace it had become.

Adelaide continued to live at 1 Reservoir Street and at a New York apartment. In New York she gave little parties at which she tried to gather together groups of John's old friends, as though she felt it her duty to keep John's memory alive. She invited Philip Hamburger, who had written the
New Yorker
profile, to one, and he remembers her sad and disheveled appearance.

In Cambridge, she continued to indulge her interest in music, toiling as best she could for various musical causes. The house at 1 Reservoir Street grew stranger as Adelaide added Benjamin West paintings, all of Mozart's musical scores framed and hung on the wall, and two stuffed leather pigs in front of the fireplace. She had a Nova Scotian couple working for her, but they weren't, she complained, very good, and she ended up doing most of the housework herself. To ward off loneliness, she invited Harvard and Radcliffe music students to come and live at her house. They were supposed to do chores—cut the grass, shovel the walks—in return for their board and keep, but the students did little work, raided her larder and liquor closet, and otherwise took advantage of her.

She tried to control her drinking and would have extended periods of relative sobriety. She and Anne Pusey, the wife of the then president of Harvard, ran an exercise class on the third floor of Adelaide's house where they and several other ladies tried to lose weight. But once, when drunk, she fell through a low plate-glass window and slashed her abdomen. Such friends as she had were deeply worried.

Two of these friends were Peggy and Roy Lamson, she a novelist and he a professor at M.I.T. Roy Lamson, an excellent amateur clarinetist, had once played in Paul Whiteman's orchestra, and a shared interest in music had brought them together. Roy had borrowed a book from Adelaide—Matthiessen's book on the New
England renaissance—and one autumn evening in Cambridge the Lamsons ran into Adelaide at a cocktail party at the Puseys', and Adelaide mentioned that she would like the book back. After the party—since their houses were only a few short blocks apart—Roy Lamson strolled over to Adelaide's house with the book.

The door to Adelaide's house was standing ajar, but the house seemed dark and empty. There was no response to the bell, and the Nova Scotian couple were nowhere in evidence. Roy Lamson became concerned. The Lamsons had found her passed out in her house once before and had carried her into bed, and so, after calling several times, he went into the house. There was a light in the upstairs hall and, as he mounted the stairs, a light from under the bathroom door. He knocked, several times, then opened the door. He entered the room with the huge sunken marble tub and the steps leading down, and there floated Adelaide in the tub, naked, face down. Lamson pulled her with difficulty—she was a heavy woman and it was a dead and slippery weight—out of the tub and covered her body with his coat. Then he called the police. The scene of that discovery still returns to him in nightmares. The coroner's verdict was not suicide. She had been preparing for her bath and perhaps had slipped or passed out. There was excessive alcohol in her blood stream. She died leaving $3,000,000 to her children.

Other lives go on.

Conney Fiske still lives outside Boston in her house with its pretty pool and private jumping course, and goes south to Southern Pines in the winter with her horses, where she rides in the hunt—sidesaddle, as always. She is rather glad she could not dine with John that last Friday night, for if she had been in the house at the time of his death there would have been unpleasant publicity for both herself and her old friend. She continues to treasure the memory of John's longest and closest friendship, and the recollections of those evenings with just the three of them, John, herself, and Gardi. Like Carol, Conney was away from Boston at the time of the funeral and could not attend. “Were you in love with him?” Conney Fiske was asked not long ago. She thought for a moment and then said, “I don't know. There were people in Boston, of course, who thought I might marry John after he divorced Christina, even though that would have meant divorcing Gardi.” Carol Brandt, happily
married, lives in New York and runs Brandt & Brandt with her son. John's children, all married and in one case remarried, are scattered here and there.

Sedgwick House still stands in Stockbridge, an imposing residence. John's children by Adelaide still go back to Kent's Island now and then. His children by Christina still summer at Curzon's Mill with the Hale cousins in a state of uneasy truce.

After John's death, “Nandina Cottage” in Pinehurst, where he had enjoyed his final winters, was sold to a Mr. and Mrs. Curtis Gary. The house has not been changed much, with the exception of a black rubber doormat which has been placed outside the front door, and which reads, in large white capital letters:

THE GARY'S

If the dead do spin, even slightly, in their graves over the follies committed by the living upon the things the dead once loved, then surely John must have winced—in amusement, in mock dismay—just winced, or turned a little, beneath the soft soil of Sawyer Hill, at this last touch that had been applied to his old house. It is not so much what he would have had to say about the use of “personalized” doormats. But to John, such a stickler for proper punctuation and such a foe of the overuse of it, the misused apostrophe on this particular doormat would have struck him as the final comic capstone of his life. He would certainly have used it in a story.

A John P. Marquand Check List
*

Symbols: N, novel; SN, serial novel; SS, short story; NF, nonfiction; MP, motion picture; P, play. The titles of the major published books are given in capital letters; their titles as magazine serials, if different, follow in parentheses.

1915

PRINCE AND BOATSWAIN. SEA TALES FROM THE RECOLLECTION OF REAR-ADMIRAL CHARLES E. CLARK. As related to James Morris Morgan and John Phillips Marquand, NF.

1921

“The Right That Failed,”
Saturday Evening Post
, July 23, SS.

1922

“The Unspeakable Gentleman,”
Ladies' Home Journal
, February,

March, May, SN.

THE UNSPEAKABLE GENTLEMAN, N.

“Only a Few of Us Left,”
Saturday Evening Post
, January 14, 21, SN.

“Eight Million Bubbles,”
Saturday Evening Post
, January 28, SS.

“Different from Other Girls,”
Ladies' Home Journal
, July, SS.

“How Willie Came Across,”
Saturday Evening Post
, July 8, SS.

“The Land of Bunk,”
Saturday Evening Post
, September 16, SS.

“Captain of His Soul,”
Saturday Evening Post
, November 4, SS.

1923

FOUR OF A KIND (“The Right That Failed,” “Different from Other Girls,” “Eight Million Bubbles,” “Only a Few of Us Left”), SS collection.

“The Ship,”
Scribner's Magazine
, January, SS.

“The Sunbeam,”
Saturday Evening Post
, January 20, SS.

“By the Board,”
Saturday Evening Post
, March 17, SS.

1924

“The Jervis Furniture,”
Saturday Evening Post
, April 26, SS.

“The Black Cargo,”
Saturday Evening Post
, September 20 through October 18, SN.

“‘Pozzi of Perugia,'”
Saturday Evening Post
, November 8 through 22, SN.

“A Friend of the Family,”
Saturday Evening Post
, December 13, SS.

1925

THE BLACK CARGO, N.

LORD TIMOTHY DEXTER OF NEWBURYPORT, MASS., NF.

“The Educated Money,”
Saturday Evening Post
, February 14, SS.

“The Big Guys,”
Saturday Evening Post
, February 21, SS.

“The Foot of the Class,”
Saturday Evening Post
, March 21, SS.

“Much Too Clever,”
Saturday Evening Post
, April 25, SS.

“The Old Man,”
Saturday Evening Post
, June 6, SS.

“The Jamaica Road,”
Saturday Evening Post
, July 4, SS.

“The Last of the Hoopwells,”
Saturday Evening Post
, December 5, SS.

1926

“Fun and Neighbors,”
Saturday Evening Post
, February 20, SS.