The Late John Marquand (6 page)

Sometimes on winter evenings Marquand would wander over to Mount Auburn Street and stand quietly in the shadows watching the bold young blades in their tail coats and silk hats and walking sticks swagger as they emerged from Gold Coast parties with beautiful young debutantes on their arms. Marquand, with his developing inner eye, could now see himself not only as the poor relation but also the social outcast, the lonely boy with his nose pressed against the windowpane, watching the shimmering life that was led by the handsome, the witty, and the rich.

But his Harvard years cannot have been as lonely and unpleasant as he later made them out to be. By his sophomore year he had made the staff of the
Harvard Lampoon
, which in itself carried considerable weight on the campus. It was at the
Lampoon
that he first met aristocratic young Gardiner Fiske, who was the magazine's business manager, and who would remain John's friend for life. He was then invited to join Professor Copeland's “Tuesday Night Readings.” The first stirrings of literary ambitions were clearly being felt.
He did well in his courses, including chemistry, and made several good friends. Among the residents at 7 Linden Street was James Bryant Conant, who would one day become Harvard's president. From their fourth-floor rooms they would drop water bags on each other, and there were elaborate duels staged with brooms and pillows. Among the games the young men invented was something they called the Two-Drink Dash. To play it, each man left 7 Linden Street at a different time and, traveling by subway, went to a bar in Boston called the Holland Wine Company, had two quick drinks, and then made it home by the quickest route possible. The winner was the man who made the round trip in the fastest time. The game was made exciting by the fact that a variety of routes was available. Also, depending on the leniency of the bartender on duty, there was always the question of whether one might or might not be permitted to buy one's two drinks because of the age limit.

But once having cast himself in the role of Poor Social Outcast, John Marquand always played it to the hilt It was in keeping with his growing habit of viewing his own life novelistically. Years later, Marquand ran into two of his classmates, Robert Nathan, the writer, and Archibald Roosevelt, one of Teddy Roosevelt's sons. The talk turned to Harvard days, and to all the bittersweet memories those days evoked.

Robert Nathan complained that although he had been snubbed and ignored as an undergraduate, now that he was a successful author he was forever being asked to make a speech for Harvard, to give money to Harvard, or to write something for some Harvard cause. “Now it doesn't seem to matter that I'm a Jew,” Nathan said. Marquand pointed out that his own situation was identical, and he even lacked Nathan's excuse of being Jewish. “They would ask me where I had gone to school,” Marquand said, “and I would tell them Newburyport High, and a look of horror would pass over their faces. Now I get nothing but letters from classmates addressed ‘Dear Old Johnny,' and asking me for such and such.”

Archie Roosevelt smiled and said, “You fellows had it easy. Look at my situation. I was the son of a former President of the United States, perhaps the most famous figure of his time. I had gone to Groton. Do you think anyone paid any attention to me?
I
never made the Porcellian.”

John Marquand used to tell this story with amusement. And yet, at the same time, it seemed to puzzle him. He had convinced himself that the fact of Newburyport High School—that and nothing else—had kept him out of Porcellian, A.D., or even the Spee. Newburyport High School had become, as it were, the plot device by which the best clubs had bypassed him. But, in Archie Roosevelt's case, why? Novelistically, it made no sense at all.

Chapter Five

Christina Sedgwick was a delicately beautiful blonde creature with slender legs and a tiny waist and an appealing, almost childlike manner. John Marquand met her in Cambridge shortly after his graduation from Harvard with the class of 1915. He had gone to work for the
Boston Transcript
as a cub reporter and was managing a meager existence on a salary of $15 a week. He fell hopelessly in love with her.

Years later, after nearly thirteen years of a sometimes-happy-sometimes-not marriage and a bitter divorce, Marquand would romanticize Christina, turning her into an exotic fairy-tale heroine of perfect gentleness, goodness, and grace—into the kind of wife he felt he
ought
to have had, rather than the perplexing and complicated actuality that Christina Sedgwick was. She certainly had charm, and a dainty and winsome gaiety and humor that could be quite beguiling. But she also, having been brought up as a proper New England lady, was completely impractical, incapable of coping with the realities of life. She had led what is called a
sheltered existence, and much of its shelter was the creation of her own personality. Sometimes she seemed to be living on another star.

She never, for instance, seemed to know quite where she was. She would go out for a walk and soon find herself lost and, when she asked for directions and these were pointed out to her, she would smile sweetly and then turn and walk dreamily the opposite way. Her ethereal vagueness could be both endearing and exasperating, for in addition to being vague she was also forgetful. She would forget invitations and show up in the wrong places for appointments. She would make dates with Marquand and then fail to appear. He began proposing marriage to her soon after their first meeting, and sometimes she would accept his proposals and sometimes she would demur. When she accepted, she would have forgotten the acceptance a day later. Everything about Christina was haphazard and disorganized. One afternoon she was seen walking on Beacon Hill and holding one end of what was clearly a dog's leash, apparently quite unaware that no dog was attached to the other end. Once in a restaurant she was observed carefully gathering up
three
gloves. She was a child-woman who had to be guided and led, and in this capacity she had always been served by her mother, Mrs. Alexander C. Sedgwick of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Perhaps it was Christina's Princess Lointaine quality that supported John Marquand's feeling from the beginning that, socially, he was from the wrong side of the tracks. Certainly his Marquand-Fuller lineage was every bit as distinguished as Christina's. Still, she was a Sedgwick, and John Marquand was very much aware that, as they say in New England, “Sedgwicks are Sedgwicks.” Sedgwick House in Stockbridge, the family seat, is an imposing yellow house that addresses a wide elm-shaded lawn facing Main Street, a local landmark pointed out with pride to visitors. In the Stockbridge Church the Sedgwick pews are placed in a chancel so that Sedgwicks can sit above everybody else. Beyond the church lies the Sedgwick burial plot, a circular piece of real estate known as the Sedgwick Pie. At the center of the Pie reposes an ancient ancestor, Judge Theodore Sedgwick, and around him lie all the other Sedgwicks, their heads away from the center in order that, at the sound of the last trump, all the Sedgwicks may rise and face Judge Theodore who, it is assumed, will have a verdict of his own
to deliver to each of them. The Sedgwick servants, meanwhile, are buried separately, “below the salt.” So seriously are the Sedgwicks taken in Stockbridge that it is said that in spring all the peeping frogs in the local ponds chirp “Sedgwick, Sedgwick, Sedgwick.”

Though most Sedgwicks are comfortably off, there is no Sedgwick family fortune, as such, to speak of. But the Sedgwicks have long represented other things in Boston. More than money, they have stood for intellectual achievement, civic rectitude, cultural responsibility—qualities which traditional Boston has always admired. Sedgwicks have provided Boston with scholars, teachers, essayists, poets, clergymen. They have, meanwhile, not been shy about
marrying
money, and several Sedgwicks have married Cabots and Peabodys. Perhaps the most important fact about the Sedgwicks, as far as young John Marquand was concerned, was that Christina's uncle, Ellery Sedgwick, was then the editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
, the only magazine that proper Boston deigned to read and take seriously. In Boston, when one spoke of the Magazine, one meant the
Atlantic Monthly
, just as to speak of the President did not mean the occupant of the White House but the head of Harvard. To Marquand, a hack reporter for a daily newspaper, the presence of the great editor of the Magazine in Christina's family tree was awesome. Uncle Ellery, who set the literary taste of New England, became a gray eminence in the background as John and Christina's courtship started on its uncertain path.

It was the spring of 1916, and between his work at the
Transcript
and courting Christina John Marquand had also joined Battery A of the Massachusetts Field Artillery, a National Guard unit. “Preparedness” had become the popular if somewhat vaguely defined motto of those pre-World War I days, and young men all over America were starting to set their military courses. But John's joining Battery A was done, more than for any patriotic reason, to impress Christina and her family. Battery A was something of an elite corps. There were, to begin with, only 190 men in it, and nearly all of them were Harvard men of “good” families. There were two Peabodys, a Cabot, an Appleton, a Bradley, and an Otis, along with Gordon Hammersley from the New York
Social Register
and a Philadelphia Strawbridge. Battery A provided a pleasant diversion, and its assignments were far from strenuous; the Tuesday
night winter drills were held at Boston's exclusive New Riding Club, and, in spring, maneuvers moved out to the country club in suburban Brookline. Members of Battery A were permitted to exercise their horses in the bridle paths along the Fenway and Jamaica Pond, and they were frequently accompanied by young debutantes riding sidesaddle in dark blue habits with derby hats secured to their heads by black elastic bands under their chins. Locally, the young men in Battery A were called “The Blue Bloods,” and it was said that the unit was composed of “millionaires' sons and willy-boys”—epithets which the carefree young blades hardly minded in the least. The swath they cut in their snappy uniforms on their thoroughbred horses was part of the fun of playing soldier. For John Marquand, membership in Battery A was an even headier experience because he had, in a real sense, been invited to join his very first club.

Then, on June 19, 1916—the day before Harvard Class Day, and just when everyone who was anyone had made his or her summer social plans—the blow fell. Pancho Villa, the Mexican bandit, had been causing trouble at the border, including several raids into United States territory, and, supported by the Mexican authorities, a detachment of American troops was ordered into Mexico under General Pershing. Federalized state guards were to back up the expedition. The Massachusetts Militia, including Battery A, was ordered to report for immediate duty.

Battery A at the Border! It became the rallying cry of a whole generation of young Bostonians, the source of an endless supply of comic anecdotes which only those who had shared the experience could appreciate or understand. From the outset, the adventure had a musical-comedy quality as weeping mothers and girl friends with parasols assembled in huge Pierce-Arrow touring cars to kiss the troops good-by from their departure point in Framingham. As their train made its way across the country into the Southwest, flag-waving crowds gathered at station stops to cheer on the youthful Soldiers. Once, outside St. Louis, when the train made an unscheduled stop near an inviting stream, a number of young men took the opportunity to bathe and were forced to run naked down the tracks when the train started up without them. Song, ribaldry,
and whiskey were the order of the day and night aboard the rattling cars.

When the group reached Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, a pattern of life was established. By day there was the dreary routine of army camp life in the dusty desert under a hot summer Texas sun. But the nights were cool, ideal for partying, or for going to dances at the El Paso del Norte Hotel, or for simply sitting around in tents telling stories. Baseball teams and track meets were organized, but, as the summer weeks wore on, tedium set in which was aggravated by the fact that not the slightest trace of an enemy appeared on the horizon. There was talk of abandoning the outfit and going home, and one evening, after much gin, a young Peabody and one of his Lowell cousins set out on foot to go back to Boston. They were found the next day, passed out, in the desert about fifteen miles from camp. No disciplinary action was taken against the two by the commander of this detachment of innocents.

Then, just as abruptly as it had been ordered into Texas, Battery A, in September, was ordered back to Massachusetts. In Boston, the men were given heroes' welcomes. Accompanied by local ice-wagon horses, they were marched through the city's streets past cheering crowds. The newspapers praised their courage and the fact that they had “sacrificed so much and had rushed away to serve if need be on foreign soil.” Battery A had, of course, accomplished absolutely nothing; not a weapon had been fired. But the men of Battery A had acquired a shared experience that they would treasure for a lifetime, and John Marquand had made more friends in three months than in all his years at Harvard. They were, furthermore, friends of what he liked to consider his “class.”

Six months later, America was in the war, and Marquand set off for Officers' Training Camp at Plattsburg, New York, embarked upon a much more serious military commitment. Plattsburg was quite different from the palmy life with Battery A, and Marquand found the routine there both wearying and terrifying—and yet, again for Christina's sake, he was determined to succeed at it. One false step in the three-month training program and he would have been sent home in disgrace. But he passed the course and, in July, 1917, received his commission as a first lieutenant in the United States Army.

From Plattsburg, Marquand was transferred to Fort Devens in Massachusetts, and from there to Fort Greene, North Carolina. Because he had learned to both write and speak French at Harvard—though he spoke with a decided New England accent—it was decided by army higher-ups that he could be put to good use in France as an interpreter with a Military Police unit. This struck Marquand as an interesting enough assignment but, just before departing Fort Greene, he was reassigned—in what always struck him as typical military lunacy—to an artillery brigade with the Fourth Division, stationed outside Bordeaux.