Black Sun, page 3
He married Henrietta Marion Grew in the autumn of 1895 in Manchester, on Boston’s North Shore. Harry’s mother was as serene as her husband was edgy. One of her son’s childhood friends recalls her: “I was playing at Harry’s house. I remember one time, for no reason at all, she brought me a present. And I just instinctively threw my arms up around her and kissed her. I thought, That was a strange thing to do. But she made it a natural thing to do.” She was quiet, but not mousy; pious, but not strident in her faith; gentle, but not plastic. She was too sensitive and feminine in her manner to qualify as that most Bostonian of female creatures, the low-heeler, the aristocratic, gutsy, plain talker. But like low-heelers, she was without guile or pretension. She liked to play golf, and to read seriously, and to travel far to see strange sights. (She once remarked, in an uncharacteristically scatterbrained sentence: “It’s interesting—things that are interesting interest me.”)
Her passion was for flowers—especially wild flowers—and she wrote about them for Nature, and lectured on botany. She was a founder and president of the Garden Club of America, and sent her gardener to agricultural school, and her greenhouse at The Apple Trees, the Crosbys’ great white summer place in Manchester, became a botanical marvel. People from all around Boston who were not related by blood to her knew her as Cousin Rita, later as Aunt Rita, and it is not recorded that she ever in her life did anyone intentional injury.
Her husband was a man of sudden changes, like his son, and his character was a patchwork of paradoxes. He was known as the Napoleon of the North Shore, and that bigger little man was his idol. He never passed through Paris without visiting the Emperor’s tomb at the Invalides, and he liked to quote a fellow admirer’s inflated apostrophe to their hero: “He cast a doubt on all past glories, he made all future renown impossible.” In matters of reputation, the figure that a man cut in society, Harry’s father regarded himself as a very Roman, imperial and consequential.
But in his personal affairs he was petty, fussy and fretful. He would pack his bags days before he left on a trip, and arrive at the station hours early, and refuse to leave a train in transit for fear of being abandoned. When his wife traveled alone—which was often—he forever pressed instructions upon her, who was more willing to run risks, and more curious: “Be careful not to slip on the wet decks! Keep your passport buttoned to your chemise!”
He was frequently a stuffed shirt, but toward his son he acted without formality, and allowed himself to be addressed in a spirit of bonhomie, so that an illusion of intimacy between them persisted long after they had failed—to their mutual sorrow—to understand each other. In one matter of taste, however, they understood each other perfectly and forever. They were excited by pretty girls, and intolerant of plain ones. As a grown man Harry wrote his mother, who was plain (though not, perhaps, to his eye), a letter about a friend’s wife that must have drawn a drop or two of blood from Henrietta Crosby: “She looks like nothing at all. When I first saw her three years ago she was quite pretty—now she is dreadful looking. I wouldn’t stay ten minutes with a girl if she wasn’t pretty.”
In his stimulations and interior commotions, Harry’s father liked to flirt, and a peculiar social convention of his time and city afforded him an occasion and license. In Boston it was considered at least marginally correct for ladies to entertain gentlemen who were not their husbands at tea during “calling hours” every afternoon, between four and six. Stephen Crosby took liberal advantage of this indulgence to visit many ladies, and one in particular, the wife of a bank president.
It is not known whether he indulged in what we would call an affair, but certainly he preferred the company of many girls, and many women, to the company of his wife. Esther Grew Parker, the niece and goddaughter of Harry’s mother, did not care at all for Stephen Crosby: “He had no intellectual character; in fact, he was quite snobbish about intellectuals, and I think Rita was rather understanding about them. I really loved her, more even than my own mother. She did all sorts of things for me. She was forceful, in a gentle sort of way, humorous and close to her children, because her marriage wasn’t particularly happy.” Mrs. Parker’s brother, James Grew, is blunter: “Steve Crosby was very much a man’s man, very popular with my father, and my father’s friends, and all that generation, and I could never see why. She was such a marvelous person; he didn’t measure up at all. They had one of those marriages that today wouldn’t have lasted, but they belonged to another era.”
They did indeed. Harry’s mother was surely wounded by her husband’s various affections, but like him she was pledged to things as they had been, were, and must remain. So that, supported by her wit and generosity, and fortified by her self-persuasion that her husband and his lady friends confined their intercourse to tea and gossip on the ground floor, she endured Stephen Crosby’s reluctance to concentrate his attention exclusively on her. And Harry, who repaid her love with high interest, was her consolation.
Three years after Harry was born, the Crosbys’ only other child came along, Katherine Schuyler Crosby, called Kitsa, and soon after that the family moved from their comfortable house at 304 Berkeley Street—between Beacon and Marlboro—to a big place nearby at 95 Beacon Street, on the northwest corner of the Boston Public Garden. The backyard went down near an esplanade beside the Charles River (till Storrow Drive effaced it) and shrubs bordered the large site. The views from the house, along Beacon Street, and of the Public Garden, and up and down river, were remarkable. Sometimes the Charles froze hard enough for the family to skate clear across it.
The house was lavishly furnished and huge, with a dance floor big enough to accommodate one hundred and fifty guests. A portrait of Gen. Van Rensselaer hung in the library, and there, among volumes bound in leather, dark blue, dark green, dark red, dusted and oiled, Harry would sprawl on a couch, his head in his mother’s lap while she read to him: Ivanhoe, The Talisman, Henry Esmond. A fire always burned in winter, and the chairs were deep, stuffed with goose down. When he was still very young, his mother, whom he called Mammy-Gu, recited verses to him, and her favorite, and his, was the first stanza of “Songs of Seven”:
There’s no dew left on the daisies and clover,
There’s no rain left in heaven.
I’ve said my “seven times” over and over,
Seven times one are seven.
His father gave him rewards and prizes for learning poems by heart; “Sheridan’s Ride” and “The Death of Napoleon” were required material. During Stephen Crosby’s freshman year at Harvard a lecture had been delivered by Col. T. W. Higginson called “Literature as a Profession.” It is unlikely that Harry’s father bothered to attend it, but surely the kind of literature the Colonel discussed was not the kind Harry came to write. It was not unknown for the sons of Brahmins to make their way by words, and through ideas, as long as the ideas were respectable and the words chaste. But literature was by no means a profession of choice. The members of Stephen Crosby’s class, two hundred and eighty-nine of them, reported five years after graduation on their callings and inclinations. There were two fiction writers in the class of 1891. The Atlantic Monthly, whose offices are within sight of 95 Beacon, was acceptable in a pinch, but the periodical in which Stephen Crosby wished to find his son’s name published was the Boston Evening Transcript, on the page given over to business, or society. And the book of books was the Directory of Directors.
Like most children, Harry did not much confide in his father, but neither did he bridle against his father’s view of the world or his father’s ambitions for his son. When he was twenty, Harry wrote his mother from the war in France, without irony, to still her worry about his behavior and ambitions: “Don’t think for a moment that I don’t take your advice or at least give it very careful thought, and there’s nothing that I value more in this world than yours and Pa’s advice.” Her advice was to heed the Scripture, to act with generosity, to behave with decency, and to live within his income. His father’s advice was to be brave, to charm, to have a lively concern for the good opinion of his peers, to join the A.D. when he reached Harvard, to make his way in business, and to live within his income.
Harry was a mischievous boy, who liked to throw water bombs from the upstairs Chinese room, with its intricately lacquered ceiling, and black carpet, and exotic flowered wallpaper, and black lacquer bed, and red flamingo set in a black picture frame. Sometimes the butler would be obliged to look down his snoot at wet victims standing enraged on the stoop at 95 Beacon, and explain to them that they were not wet, as they believed, and that if they were, their discomfort had nothing to do with Mr. Crosby’s well-ordered household. Finally, Mr. Crosby himself fell victim to the stunt, and Harry’s practice ceased for a while. He liked to tease his plump sister, and pull the girls’ pigtails; he was still throwing water bombs from high places the month he died, and he continued to pull the girls’ pigtails, too, after his fashion.
His portrait hung in the salon: his hair was gold, and he wore a white smock and white socks and white slippers, and held a large India rubber ball. His lower lip drooped in a pout, a legacy from his father’s mother.
Every Thanksgiving a huge feast would be given at Harry’s Uncle Ned Grew’s house, and Harry’s grandmother would appear from Albany, tall, grave, gaunt, nervous, dressed in black, a foreshadowing of the deathly figure Harry himself later contrived to cut. The Thanksgiving dinners were so populous that some of the guests, though kinsmen, were strangers one to another.
Such good people as the Crosbys and Grews and Beals would also gather at weddings and coming-out parties, but funerals were the social occasions of choice, and going to them was a Boston habit and hobby. The late Lucius Beebe wrote of this odd and durable custom: “Boston has always been a funeral-going town, and a service of importance at Trinity or Emmanuel is sure to find the first citizens out in force with wide bands on their top hats, happy in an impenetrable, but for all that thoroughly enjoyable, atmosphere of gloom. The custom is rooted in respectable antiquity and the gentlemen of the town once counted the number of times they had participated in such pomps as most young men today take pleasure in the number of times they have served their friends as best man or usher.”
For the Crosbys, later for Harry, death was a familiar, nothing that held terror, something that enticed, something to roll over in the imagination, and test, and look at from across the fence, close up. When he was twenty-nine, Harry wrote in his notebook, without much amazement: “I ponder death more frequently than I do any other subject, even in the most joyous and flourishing moments of my life.”
During the summers the family would retire to Manchester, on the North Shore, about twenty-five miles from Boston. It was a beautiful town, with heavy woods and rocky headlands alternating with long stretches of white sand. The Apple Trees was a grand house built well back from the road on what had once been an enormous orchard. Behind it was a barn and a greenhouse, and in front was a high wall, called the Morgan Memorial, built with an endowment from Uncle Jack Morgan’s father to isolate J. P. Morgan, Jr., from public view, and protect him and Aunt Jessie from any possible embarrassment.
Weekdays the fathers of boys and girls like Harry and Kitsa commuted to town on a private train called The Flying Fisherman, pulled by the Boston & Maine. Sometimes Harry would go with his father to watch a Red Sox game, but mostly he stayed at the shore, swimming at Coffin’s Beach or his favorite, Singing Beach—so called because its fine white sand gave off an odd tune, something like a whistle, when it was stepped upon. He especially cherished foggy days, and liked to hear the horn boom off the point that protected Manchester’s harbor, which was busy with pleasure boats. He swam, if he could get away with it, when it was forbidden to swim, when the surf was high and there was under-tow. They flew flags at both beaches, red for warm water and blue for cold, and he liked blue best. He liked green, for medium temperature, least: he was never one for in-betweens.
The children rode in pony carts, and rolled hoops, and wore sailor hats, and their hair was cut in bangs. Just as Stephen Crosby had the Somerset Club, and his wife the Chilton Club, the children had a place called the Montserrat Club, run by Mrs. Jackson, whom Harry would torment by walking in golf cleats upon the mahogany table. Mrs. Jackson called him the Sultan, but the nickname didn’t stick: something in him even then did not invite liberties.
There was a crowd of kids at the shore: George Richmond “Tote” Fearing, Philip Shepley, George Weld, Francis Lothrop, Lawrence Foster. Harry was the gang leader, the one who bestowed nicknames and led everyone into scrapes. George Weld was Harry’s especially close friend, and together they built a tree house in Manchester and decorated it with baseball cards of the dramatis personae of the Red Sox and the Braves, and together they bedeviled Kitsa when other action was slow. There was always something doing, swimming or golf or tennis. The little children had governesses, but manners were easy and the kids went barefoot if they wished.
There were, however, social regulations, and for a young man of Harry’s station they would come to have a character as inexorable as gravity. The clubs where he played—the Essex County, the Myopia Hunt, the Montserrat—were closed to members of the world’s exotic races. For the matter of that, they weren’t open to many Protestants, either. Exclusion in Boston, the Family City, had—continues to have—a calculated quality, as though it is performed for the sake of legend, to build a record.
Only a few thousand people (the Crosbys, Grews and all their friends among them) were listed in the Social Register; nevertheless, one gentleman objected that the studbook had become a “damned telephone book.” To assure that bloodlines never blurred, the Boston Evening Transcript published, every Wednesday, the most comprehensive genealogy column in existence. The story is told of a young Bostonian eager to make a dollar or two in the commercial hurly-burly of Chicago, that odd place without history, beyond the antipodes. His prospective employer sent to Boston for letters of recommendation, and such was the nature of the replies that were returned that the employer felt obliged to explain that “we were not considering using your young man for breeding purposes.” Until 1905 newspapers in Boston printed the names of undergraduates elected to Hasty Pudding, a club less exclusive than Porcellian or the A.D., and thus more socially confusing, in the order in which they were desired and selected, so that some decent hierarchy could be maintained among the young men. Indeed, till the 1800’s, freshmen at Harvard College were listed in rank according to their social standing.
All this was in the air, the given of election and privilege, but gentlemen didn’t discuss it much. Mrs. Crosby instructed Harry in charity, and piety, and perhaps even a kind of tolerance that extended to those less socially fortunate than herself, her husband and their children, as long as those less socially fortunate remained content and in place.
Mrs. Crosby studied the Bible, and under her influence so did her son. Together they would often drive the family Lancia through the Essex Woods, or along the shore to Coffin’s Beach, stopping for a picnic to admire the view toward Plum Island and down along the white flat stretch of sand. Mrs. Crosby permitted her son, when she was alone with him, to take liberties with the character and habits of her husband, a practice that encouraged intimacy between Harry and his mother, and subverted his regard for his father. Together they would joke about Mr. Crosby’s loud voice, or his vanity and fussiness, or his readiness to pontificate. Harry and his mother laughed at the memory of Mr. Crosby’s dissertation on the art of shaving, delivered the first day he discovered a whisker growing on his adolescent son’s chin. They would laugh at Mr. Crosby’s homilies (“More flies are caught by honey than by vinegar”) and at his anxieties, expressed again and again in the catch-question “What will people say?” (Mrs. Crosby, out of sight of her son, cared every bit as much as her husband what people said about her family.)
Harry was permitted to call his father, to his face, “the Old Rodent,” a familiar endearment that Mr. Crosby tolerated because he felt so secure in his conviction that Harry respected him and was intimidated by his high place in the world. And also because he loved his son, and wished to be his friend. But Harry’s easiest and deepest friendship was with his mother. They played a great deal of golf together, and tennis, and Mrs. Crosby could spot her son 30–love every game, and whip him despite the handicap. When he was still a boy, she knew him back and forth: “Do you remember you would always win the toss by holding the golf ball in your left hand? I would invariably guess the right hand?” He remembered, many years after their games, when she could no longer decode his messages, when he wished she could.
At night there would be dances for the young people, or Harry would play auction bridge with his parents and his sister. Then he’d climb the stairs at The Apple Trees to the sleeping porch and listen for the foghorn. He liked it best when summer turned, and leaves began to give up and fall, and the sky went to clouds. All his life he looked forward to autumn: not for its crispness, but for its sadness, and black and gray were his favorite colors. It was a taste that his family, with its fascination with dead times past, and dead ancestors buried in family plots, and the end of things, could appreciate.
Not that Harry was gloomy as a boy, or death-obsessed. He was cheery, hospitable to mischief, energetic, well-liked and quick to take friends, attractive to the girls around the North Shore and attracted to them, especially to two of them, Ella Snelling and Sister Caswell, whom he called Goldenhair. He made a single exception to his rule that any girl in whom he took interest must be comely. His cousin Betty Beal, the daughter of his Uncle Bob and Aunt Elizabeth Beal (who was said by some to be Boston’s foremost snob), was plain. She was also Harry’s closest girl friend; he confided in her as in few boys, or none, and called her while she was still a child “Auntie E,” perhaps causing her no pain by such a spinsterly title, even though he was by two years her senior.
