Black Sun, page 13
None of it sounded right to Polly. Try as he might, Harry could not make her promise to marry him. She had no wish to remove herself from New York to the contempt of every person who mattered in Harry’s hometown. Very well, Harry would live wherever she wished: “I hate Boston—but we could live on the Shore in summer & N.Y. the rest of the time. I’ve liked every friend of yours you’ve ever introduced me to,” he lied, “and am sick to death of this blue-blooded régime.” He assured her and reassured her: “We’ll never live in damned old Boston.” Still, she would not say yes; she said she would like more than anything to say yes, but she wouldn’t.
Harry’s diary entries for March, 1922, tell what it was like for him:
March 8th: Her preciousness. Yet thrust deep into my heart is the sharp knife of despair. Adios. Shall never forget her eyes. Encountered my father. Pathetic attempt at sympathy. “Will give you a Rolls-Royce” and “People would never have approved.” Whiskey and to bed. Cried all night.
March 12th: Have not been to the Bank for five days.
March 14th: Resigned from the Bank.
A week later Mrs. Crosby called upon her brother-in-law to help, and J. P. Morgan agreed to give Harry a position in Paris, for one year, at Morgan, Harjes et Cie. Harry’s spirits lifted temporarily, and he even managed to reconcile himself to Polly’s intransigent refusal to marry him. He wrote her that he had met with his Uncle Jack in Boston: “I saw him alone for but five minutes yesterday and he was damn nice about you and me. The Morgans have certainly been great friends of ours during our many vicissitudes.” Most of Harry’s kin loathed Polly, but his Aunt Jessie Morgan liked her and so did her husband. J. P. Morgan had bought East Island, in Long Island Sound, from Polly’s maternal grandfather, and renamed it Matinacock. He had helped Polly repeatedly to resolve her problems with his other godson, her husband Richard, and he was eager to help her to overcome whatever obstacles Boston had raised between her and her happiness. But he was merely mighty, not superhuman, and Boston would not budge, as he knew. So he arranged the exile of her lover.
Harry celebrated his resignation from the bank, and liberation from “Drearytown.” The day he met with his uncle is recorded in his diary as “one of my wild days where I threw all care to the wind and drank to excess.... Result of being happier. At midnight drove old walrus’ new automobile down the Arlington Street subway until we crashed slap-bang into an iron fence. A shower of broken glass, a crushed radiator, a bent axle, but no one hurt. Still another rotten episode to add to my rotten reputation.” The next day, March 22, he noted “remorse and the usual gestures: a letter of apology, a cheque for damages, a gold resolution for the future.”
It was past time for him to sail away from the City of Dreadful Night. And so he did—with Spud Spaulding: many wounds to share—but not before the city fired a final shot at him in the Boston section of a national society rag called Town Topics:
It looks as if the much-rumored engagement of Harry Grew Crosby and winsome and coy Mrs. Dick Peabody, one-time Molly [sic] Jacob, will not materialize into anything tangible for the present. The youth’s father, Stephen Van R. Crosby, has just executed a neat coup, which, for the present at least, will put a stop to all possibilities revolving in the minds of this infatuated young pair by sending him off on the Olympic [sic: they sailed on the Touraine] last Saturday. With a responsible party, he is to visit the battlefields where he saw service with the French and, later, our armies. Crosby, only graduating last June from Harvard, was one of the youngest American soldiers to receive the Croix de Guerre from the French Government. The family and friends of the Crosbys are hoping this separation, with its new environment, will serve to break up this unfortunate love complication....
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“fantaisiste distingué.”
—A senior Morgan banker’s opinion of Harry Crosby
When his mother secured the bank job for Harry in Paris, Polly struck a bargain with him: she would leave for Europe also, and they would rendezvous there as long as he ceased to pester her about a wedding. He agreed to the terms: “When you come to Paris I’ll promise not to keep urging you to marry me unless you want to and in that case we’ll make a dash for the nearest eglise.” (Harry had ambitions for a church wedding, and Polly didn’t care for any kind of wedding at all. However, in the same mid-March letter, Harry took pains to remind her, before he left for Europe, that she had a contract to be fulfilled: “It was a pure gamble on my part as a year in Paris alone away from home and friends would be agony and I’d be miserable. Before taking this pretty decisive step I thought over all we had discussed and finally decided that you cared enough to come and live with me in Paris even if you wouldn’t marry me. You told me you would do this.”
And so she did. Polly sold a strand of pearls to pay for her passage to England, left her children in the care of her mother, and was staying with her aunt and uncle George Elin at their estate near London, Ardleigh Park, when Harry telephoned from across the English Channel the day he arrived in Paris, May 1. He was to begin work at Morgan, Harjes & Co. a week later, but his friend Philip Shepley, from the North Shore and American Ambulance Corps, had urged him to come to Turkey, so no sooner had he arrived than he “tossed the suncross to see whether to go to Constantinople to join the Armenian Relief or go to work at the Bank as I had promised Mamma. Verdict said stay. Instead flew to London.”
His flight across the Channel was in those days a dramatic and expensive gesture (a one-way ticket cost seventy dollars) and it impressed Polly, who took leave of her alarmed relatives three days after Harry “dropped in from the clouds and swooped me up from the family nest.” She flew with him to Paris, and Harry began work at the bank May 8. He gave as his address the Hôtel Métropolitan on rue Cambon, where he shared rent and lodgings with an American named Lou Norrie,[1] but he and Polly in fact lived together in a little room at the nearby Regina, on the Right Bank. He was hired at a salary of six hundred francs per month, plus a living allowance of seven hundred and fifty. With the franc at eighteen to the dollar, this came to seventy-five dollars per month. J. P. Morgan’s instructions to his bank on Harry’s behalf had made it clear that his nephew was to be hired “at a salary satisfactory to us as the boy has independent means.” So he was, with the notation to his previous employer at the National Shawmut Bank that French salaries were not as high as American salaries, and that Harry “will be of no particular use to us for some little time.” Shrewd guess, but optimistic: he was never worth a nickel to Morgan, Harjes & Co.
May and June in Paris were a lark. The couple walked together and lay together in the Bois de Boulogne. Harry took Polly to the battlefields he couldn’t seem to stay away from: “And how I have changed but the land itself is little changed since the war and it is still The Waste Land.” (Harry had read Eliot’s long poem when it was first published, earlier that year.) On his twenty-fourth birthday at the fashionable Château de Madrid just outside Paris, he bribed a waiter to exchange clothes with him so that he could dance the tango wearing a dinner jacket. Afterwards, they swam in a pond in the forest, and then slept together between linen sheets.
One hot afternoon they hailed a taxi near the Place Vendôme, and when the cabdriver asked where they would like to be taken, Harry said Deauville, hours away on the Normandy coast. And later, in mid-July, Harry wangled a leave of absence from the bank and took Polly to Venice, on the Simplon Express. They registered at Casa Petrarca, an orange-red hotel beside the Rialto on the Grand Canal, and used the names Vicomte and Vicomtesse Myopia, scoring a point off Boston’s Myopia Hunt Club. One week later, they went to the Normandy coast again, to Étretat, and walked the bluffs and beaches, and Harry swam naked in the sea while Polly watched him from beneath a lace parasol.
Then, in Polly’s words, “Boston trespassed into our Paradise again.” Harry had flirted during the summer with a girl from Boston, and one day the girl’s mother, “an indignant hyena-matron,” visited Polly and told her she was ruining Harry’s life, that Harry loved her daughter, and they wanted to marry but he couldn’t break away from Caresse, who was furious, and told her she was leaving anyway and would sail for home the very next day. Polly left abruptly for America on July 22, and Harry was disconsolate: “Why did I let her go why why why O Sun-God tell me why.” He was, oddly, more certain of their future than ever, “but there are sharp knives in the heart (to be withdrawn).” When the Boston girl left three weeks later, Harry did not even send her off: “Another closed book. She was like an appendix. Now she has been removed I feel strong and unafraid.”
He took inventory of his recent history, found his values to be depressed, and resolved to reform himself. Nine days after Polly left for America, Harry wrote in his diary that the July just ending had been his “most unbalanced, unsettled, unforgiveable month.” He pinned a chart on the wall, naming the evils he wished to conquer: “Thus Cigarettes (Smokeplums), Gambling (Pyramid), Girls (Masked Marvel), Talkativeness (Chatterbox). Each day is represented by a square. The race from start to finish is a hundred squares. Each day I abstain I shall advance the name (or horse) one square.” Such lists and good resolutions were common symptoms among Bostonians, who were even quicker to detect the signs of sin in themselves than in others. For a week the chart seemed to work, and Harry wrote Polly on August 7: “I am more worthy of you now than at any time & so pure in heart and so much all yours that you would be a fool to marry any one else.... Reggie in the Ritz Bar the other day said My God Harry I’ve never seen you this way before. Keep it up as you’re most attractive and dignified.”
But Harry could never leave off breaking his good resolutions, any more than he could leave off making them. On August 9, Harry organized a carriage race, “pour me distraire,” down the Champs Élysées to the Ritz Bar, for a prize of five hundred francs: “At the Concorde the four hacks were well grouped and it was not until after the Rue de Rivoli that Joan and I were defeated in the final sprint by half a length, the others trailing behind. Brandy for the coachmen, cocktails for ourselves.... To make of life a race.” And two weeks after he had begun his hundred-day race toward Goodness he gave an “elaborate luncheon at the Ritz (Extravagance moves back a square) then drove a virgin named Jeanne (she works in the Bank) to Deauville (Masked Marvel moves back a square) where I left her with her cousins and all night it rained and all night I gambled (Pyramid moves back a square) in the Salle de Baccara. What a spectacle! What avarice! What hunted faces! What folly! Smoked and drank and went to bed at five in the morning. (Smokeplums, Ritz Bar and Nocturne all move back a square). But I was morose and silent and Chatterbox advanced.” One week later, he and Lou Norrie took five show girls to Deauville (“Masked Marvel moves back two and a half squares”), where he ran on the beach, played the horses, drank and gambled.
After such adventures he went to work and sat at his desk in a stupor, having too little energy even to eat lunch. He would torment himself with self-hatred, wondering what his mother, and Polly, would think of him if they could see him. On the reverse side of a Morgan, Harjes check, he composed further resolutions: “1/To behave—no hard liquor—no femmes 2/Not to get too involved 3/When we marry to promise to play the game no matter what happens.” Then, after work, he joined his friends from the Ritz Bar in a high-stakes baccarat game, throwing empty champagne bottles out the window, barring their door against the angry proprietor: “Wilder and wilder, higher and higher the stakes; twenty louis a hand [one louis d’or piece, twenty-five francs, was worth almost a dollar and fifty cents], thirty louis, forty, fifty and the last few hands at a hundred louis. Won double what I lost at Deauville. Lucky in cards, unlucky in love. The hell you say.”
Finally, on August 30, exhausted, sick with longing, disgusted, he wrote in his diary, “can’t stand it any longer!” He sent a cable to Polly in Nantucket, where she was vacationing with her mother and brothers: BUNNY I CAN’T STAND IT ANOTHER DAY WITHOUT YOU. SAILING SATURDAY AQUITANIA STEERAGE DONT SAY A WORD TO ANYONE WILL MEET YOU AT THE BELMONT. HAVE BEEN SICK BUT BETTER TODAY. WILL HAVE COME RIGHT BACK. WIRE REPLY TO CAMBON. ALL MY LOVE. YOUR HARRY. He told the bank he was indisposed with the grippe and bet his roommate, Lou Norrie, who was sailing September 1, one hundred dollars that he could beat him to New York. Polly wired YES. Harry borrowed a hundred dollars to pay his passage and made his way to Cherbourg, where he was told he would have to remain a week in quarantine. He fell into an uncontrolled rage, then successfully bribed his way aboard the Aquitania. He had no money but snuck into first class and managed to win forty dollars at a game of cards, which he immediately spent on champagne for “a crowd of unfortunates (you can keep only those things which you give away).”
Three days before reaching New York, he bathed in the first-class swimming pool, and that night, dressed in evening clothes, “hair immaculately parted, shoes polished, gold-tip cigarettes, contrast to four days on the bow deck in an undershirt and a pair of torn trousers,” he took a dinner of caviar and mock turtle soup and hummingbirds on toast with a lady and her two daughters, whom he decided were “pincushions.” During coffee a steerage inspector tapped him on the shoulder and asked him by what right he had elevated himself to first class: “Would have replied ‘love’ had it not been for the pincushions. Thanked my hostess and departed without mortification. (I had eaten.)”
The Aquitania docked September 9, and Polly was at the customs barrier to greet him. The battle was over, he wrote, the race was won: “Felt like a marathon runner who has breasted the tape but who is on the verge of collapse.” They met Lou Norrie’s ship, collected Harry’s hundred-dollar wager, and were married that afternoon in the chapel of New York City’s Municipal Building. Leonard Jacob, Polly’s brother, gave away the bride. They celebrated at the Belmont, Back Bay Boston’s favorite New York hotel, then Harry telephoned his mother in Washington, D.C., where she was staying with her daughter and son-in-law, Robert Choate, whom Kitsa had married shortly before Harry sailed for France.
The Aquitania was to sail east in forty-eight hours, and the Peabody children had to be sent for, but Harry insisted on seeing his mother to explain why he had had to do what he had done. Kitsa answered Harry’s telephone call and in cold fury told him that Mrs. Crosby was too upset to speak with him. Harry and his sister had never been close, and now they never could be. Harry demanded an audience with his mother, and that Polly come to Washington with him. Polly remembered later that Kitsa warned Harry to come alone, and that Harry replied, “Nevermore.”
Together they took the midnight train to Washington, and arrived at the Choates’ house in Chevy Chase in time for breakfast: “All of us were unnerved,” Polly remembers. “It was a bad beginning. Harry’s mother never addressed a word to me. Kitsa was cool; only Robbie was compassionate. We left on the three o’clock, nearly broken in spirit. Our glorious adventure had lost its shine. They made me feel like a two-year-old who had gotten into the forbidden jam pot.”
The Peabody children were waiting with their nurse at the Belmont. When Harry saw them, he disappeared till it was time to sail next morning. It was, as Polly understood, Harry’s “Gethsemane.” Harry had moved heaven and earth to marry the woman he wanted, and like a man who has lifted too heavy a weight, or run too long a race, certain muscles had been stretched too far to function ever again at full strength. The first entry in Harry’s diary following his marriage says only that he had just read Les Désenchantées, and asks, “Am I?”
In the midst of his most strenuous efforts to win Polly, he had noticed about himself that he had “the fox’s fear of being trapped.” Polly understood this, and resolved from the beginning to abjure from the Boston custom of shaming her husband into submission; she knew that he would accept neither the whip nor the cage, so she advised him to cease his promises of reform if they were made on her behalf. She had married Harry for what he was, rather than for anything she might make of him.
But however determined she was to leave her fox free, he felt trapped anyway. Suddenly he was not merely a lover, but a stepfather, and he did not like what he suddenly was. In his courting days he had heaped gifts upon the Peabody kids, and charmed them, and perhaps his expressions of affection were even sincere. He had offered Polly advice about their care during her separation from Dick: “don’t pamper Bill,” and “don’t let little Polleen get too stubborn. She’s a knockout. I hope they’ll grow to love me.” He spoke of the children as “our infants,” but as soon as he married Polly the children became entirely hers. He wrote in his personal diary that Rimbaud and a Spanish bootblack he had recently met were the only children he should ever have cared to have. He began to uncover his authentic attitude toward Polleen and Billy even before the wedding, when Polly was in one of her willing humors and they were planning to marry: “We’ll take the infants if you think best but of course for a honeymoon it would be better if we can go without them as we would be so tied down....”
Harry wanted a married mistress, not a mother, and reminders of Polly’s domestic condition, and his, offended him extremely. A few months after their marriage, the Crosbys were visited in Paris by some guests from Boston, Ellery Sedgwick and a couple of other Harvard classmates. Harry took them to the races at Longchamp while Polly, pleading exhaustion, remained at home to read. Or so she said. Instead, she gathered her son and daughter, dressed herself in a matronly robe they liked, and spent the afternoon playing with them on the floor. Harry and his friends returned winners from the track and wanted to fetch Polly away to the circus. When he discovered familial squalor on the floor of his sitting room, Harry was shocked. Seeing Polly at play with her brats, with a motherly fit upon her, he stormed in shame out the door, pushing his friends before him. He returned three days later, bearing toys for the children and a cloth-of-gold mandarin negligée for Polly.
