Everybody Was So Young by Amanda Vaill Page B

wheelbarrow heaped with vegetables which were then handed out as favors. Apparently these Ole Plantation shenanigans sent the glittering company into gales of laughter, which can only have increased during the “ragtime potato-race,” won by Lady Diana Manners, who was dressed for speed in a white ball gown trimmed with panels of red, green, and yellow brocade.
    Although this event made headlines on two continents, it barely rated a mention in Sara’s journal: she was much more impressed by two evenings she spent earlier in the week. On July 22, she was introduced to members of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at a party given for them at the Carlton Hotel, at which the young virtuoso Arthur Rubinstein played the piano. And the next night she went to the last London performance of the company’s new ballet, Le Sacre du printemps. The ballet had created a sensation at its Paris premiere in May. Smartly dressed audience members had slapped their hissing neighbors, and a composer screamed for the “sluts” of the sixteenth arrondissement (where many of the wealthy box holders lived) to “shut up.” The cause of this brouhaha was not only Nijinsky’s angular choreography and Stravinsky’s fierce, rhythmic score (which one contemporary observer compared to “the continuous thudding of a savage’s tom-tom”); there was also the ballet’s scenario, in which a young maiden is ritually sacrificed to ensure the coming of spring, a rather unsettling parallel to the female commodity-trading that made dollar princesses out of young women like the Wiborgs. Although the London audience was somewhat less vociferous than the Parisian one, the ballet was performed only three times during the Diaghilev company’s London visit, and it is a mark of Sara’s artistic adventurousness that she saw it at all. As one critic has noted, “musically and choreographically, Sacre bid adieu to the Belle Epoque.” Sara Wiborg, it seems, was ready to do the same.
    “It must be wonderful,” Gerald wrote Sara that July, “to be doing so many things that are new to you.” He himself had been having new experiences, but of a grim and anxious sort: shortly after his parents left for a summer in Europe, Fred had come down with mastoiditis, a life-threatening infection of the mastoid bone behind the ear. He was rushed to the hospital for two emergency operations, and there ensued what Gerald described as “a month’s phantasmagoria of hospitals, operations, deliberate doctors, nurses, ether, etc. . . . he came within an hour and a half of losing his mind—or his life,—and his suffering was inhumane.” Gerald, as usual, had been the one to cope with this crisis, moving into the hospital himself to keep watch over his brother. Patrick, on business in England, was “kept informed in detail,” but Anna and Esther, vacationing in Switzerland, were left in ignorance, if not bliss. “I only wish I were 10 years younger and felt well,” Anna sighed in one letter to Gerald.
    Once Fred was on the mend, Gerald went back to work at Mark Cross; almost no one he knew was in the city, so he amused himself with reading, golf, and a new role as impresario. Esther, who was now an academically precocious schoolgirl, had written a poem, and Gerald sent it out to several magazines “for criticism only.” The editors (he informed Sara with pride) had “pronounced it ‘mature genius,”’ and he himself felt “surer each day that she will do something with her mind.” He had also been working on Sara’s behalf. He had shown some of her illustrations to the editor of Munsey’s Magazine, who “considers it all as indicative of a ‘highly developed imagination,’ . . . as good as anything he’s ever seen.” So, Gerald exhorted her, “I do hope you are going to work hard with your sketching when you return.”
    And when would that be? he asked with mock plaintiveness. In the meantime, he and Frank Wiborg had developed a rather formal friendship