Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill

with the fact that Ray was again expecting a baby—and then again, perhaps not. The Wiborgs (and the Murphys, who were also friends of the Lamberts) were invited en famille to Gerard’s birthday dinner on May 13; two days later Sara noted the actual anniversary in her diary, “Gerard’s birthday,” underlining it as if it had special significance.
    All through the East Hampton summer she played golf or drove or went walking or met visitors’ trains with Gerard. A typical entry in her diary reads:
    “Golf with G. [Gerard] and Chesley 10—In bathing—. . . L’s [Lamberts] to lunch—Mother, H. and O. and Hoyt out. To Devon with G, back 4. . . . To Sagaponack with G. to see . . . about cruise—Home 7:30.” As the summer progressed a note of strain crept into her relationship with the Lamberts, and the atmosphere at home worsened as well. Suddenly there were more “very depressed” notations in her diary, and a number of family quarrels broke out.
    There was a brief respite in June, in the form of a trip to the Republican Convention in Chicago, where Frank Wiborg was a delegate. Sara was awed by the “terrific crowds—11,000 people in the building”; and she returned to the convention each day, arriving at 10:30 in the morning and staying well into the night. On June 22, despite the forty-five-minute demonstration that had taken place for Roosevelt two days previously, Taft finally prevailed at 9:00 p.m. Olga, Hoytie, and Adeline had all returned to their rooms at the Blackstone Hotel by then, but Sara stayed to the end. She always did love a Scene.
    When she returned to East Hampton she fell again into her easy companionship with Fred and Gerald Murphy, who were both frequent summer visitors; and Adeline, possibly relieved to have Sara going about with two blamelessly unattached young men, made no objection. It seems not to have occurred to Sara to play favorites with either, but as the summer went on Gerald contrived, subtly, to tilt things in his favor. Fred was working at Mark Cross—not entirely happily, for his father was an exacting superior—but he escaped to East Hampton on weekends and played golf with Sara, and the ubiquitous Gerard. Gerald, however, had been allowed a summer of leisure before going to work at Mark Cross, and he came to the Dunes almost daily to garden and read aloud with her, accompany her sailing on Gerard Lambert’s boat, the Wild Olive, and act as her partner in winning a “very important [golf] match” on September 17.
    One evening, Sara decided it would be fun to camp out overnight on the beach below the Dunes and she persuaded Gerald to join her. Frank Wiborg came along as a reluctant chaperon, and (Sara recalled later) the three of them bundled up in blankets on the sand and “watched very damp clouds go by—for the longest time, across the stars—at an immense distance up—and dew fell on my face and wool cap.” In the morning, when Sara awoke to crystalline sunlight and the cries of the gulls, she found that Frank had decamped to the house and Gerald was still asleep. For a long time—like Psyche and Cupid—she stared at the sleeping youth, thinking how “nice” he was. And then, feeling “awfully embarrassed” and afraid he would wake up and find her watching him, she fled in silence from the beach.
    5
    “I must ask you endless question”
    SO CUPID SLEPT ON, and Sara tried to fill the void in her life with work. During the previous winter she had begun painting with the American impressionist William Merritt Chase in his studio on Fourth Avenue and 25th Street. Now, in the autumn of 1912, she started taking illustration classes with Thomas Fogarty at the Art Students’ League. Her pictures, despite their clear palette and quick gestural shorthand reminiscent of her impressionist models, seem more those of a gifted amateur than the confident handiwork of a finished artist. But she spent long hours painting in the studio and, on weekends, in East Hampton.