Edie (6 page)

HARRY SEDGWICK
 Childhood for Sedgwick boys ended when we were sent to Groton. It was founded by my maternal grandfather, Endicott Peabody, who was always called the Rector. “Just a great slab of New England granite,” as Alice Roosevelt Longworth once described him. What he liked was muscular Christianity, and though he was the head of this remarkably prestigious school, he was rather suspicious of too much intellectual learning. He once said, “I am not sure I like boys to think too much. A lot of people think a lot of things we could do without.” His aim was to turn out “perfect Christian gentlemen” and “enlightened public servants.”

MINTURN SEDGWICK
 Franklin Roosevelt, who was a Groton graduate, wrote to Mrs. Peabody when the Rector died that no one except his parents had affected him so much all his life as Mr. Peabody. FDR revived the custom of having the incoming Cabinet at Holy Communion before the inauguration. The Rector took it the first time. He went to Washington for similar occasions a number of times. Of course he always stayed at the White House. On one occasion, so the story goes, he came into the Oval Office to say goodbye, and as the Rector went out the door, the President said to a friend, “You know, I’m stI’ll scared of him.” And I’ll bet he was. Fortunately, I was a pet of the Rector’s, so we got on splendidly.

My older brother, Halla, and I were there at the same time. Francis was stI’ll at school elsewhere. Before Groton, Halla and I had been to school in England, and we had come back with these charming accents. The Groton boys nicknamed him the Duke, and they tried various nicknames on me like Viscount, but none of them stuck except Duke. So I became Duke, too, and then when I got to be a well-known athlete, it really stuck.

My brother and I rowed on the second crew at Groton. For me it was quite an honor because I was only a third-former. One Saturday, about a month before Halla was to graduate, we rowed in the hour and a half between classes and lunch. When we came in, it looked as if we might be late. We ran up from the river. My brother had a ravenous appetite and bolted his food; it disagreed with him. He went in the infirmary the next morning with a bad stomach upset. He wrote a letter about how he’d raced under a hot sun and how exhausted he’d become. Then he developed pneumonia. The last night of his life my parents were both up there. Babbo’s privately printed book,
In Memoriam,
was written about Halla—Babbo always called him Harry—and describes what happened:

That night we gathered about his bed, Minturn on one side kneeling and holding his hand, their heads near together, May and I on the other side, Ellery and Mr. Peabody at the foot. Mr. Peabody read from the prayer book and we repeated the daily prayers we had always said with the boys. It was a bitter cold night, and the windows were wide open to give Harry air. Toward morning a bird sang on the little tree close beside the window, and then, as the day was dawning, his spirit left us.

He looked very handsome as he lay there in his white linen, with sprigs of many coloured snapdragon about him. . . . The coffin was covered with a deep red pall, and lay in the chapel. A dim light was burning as Minturn and I went in to bid good night. Ellery was there. The chapel looked solemn and beautiful, full of traditional feeling, and of Harry’s sentiment for it. Horatio’s words burned themselves into me:

Good night, Sweet Prince;
And flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest.

On Sunday afternoon the funeral service was held in the chapel. Mr. Peabody delivered the eulogy, in which he compared Halla to a description from Chaucer:

He was a verray parfit gentil knyght . . .

My parents and I had breakfast in the Groton infirmary the morning after Halla’s death. My mother was in tears. I have a vivid recollection of blood oozing out of the pores of my father’s nose. An official came that day to ask my father for the “vital statistics”—to confirm Halla’s age. He was seventeen years, seven months, twenty-six days.

Francis was stI’ll a little boy at home. He came up from New York the day after our brother died. I introduced him to one of the masters at Groton since he would soon be coming to the school, and I told the master: “We’re filling up the ranks.”

My mother went into a decline right off. It was she who persuaded Babbo to write his book about Halla, just as her mother had written the little volume about Francis Minturn. Now she expressed her grief in a letter to her mother:

Darling, darling, Mamma—All that last night, I thought of you so often, and after the end, all the first day, I kept saying, “Poor, poor Mamma, I don’t wonder she nearly went crazy.” Every year, I felt more and more I understood but it is not until our own hearts are pierced that we can begin to know the suffering.

Within a year the blood vessels broke in my mother’s eyes and it seemed as if she’d become totally blind, but something arrested it. I remember she was very touching. She said, “You’re practically grown up, so I don’t worry. All I wanted was to see how Francis looks when he grows up.”

Francis was a terribly ambitious fellow, but he was very delicate when he was at Groton. He complained of severe pains. The doctors tried to tell him it was his imagination. His football coach took me aside once and said, “I hate to ask this, but is Francis sandless?” What do you call that now?—no guts, afraid of contact. Finally, a great doctor diagnosed that he had osteomyelitis. Do you know what that is? it’s a dangerous infection of the bone; it could have led within a few weeks to death or come to a head and had to be operated on. With Francis it just sort of whistled around his body. He had to use crutches at times. But there were other problems. He was high-strung, too. He told me: “I have these faraway feelings that are not part of me.” He was full of phobias. He was afraid of darkness—he
saw
things in the dark. He was so scared of water that he didn’t learn to swim until he was fourteen. He was afraid of horses for a long time, and dark woods.

Babbo at Harvard, 1879

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 It didn’t help that at the time my grandmother May had a series of strokes. Each time, my father was taken out of Groton and hurried down to be with her. But she didn’t die. He would return to school in a state of terrible anguish.

MINTURN SEDGWICK
 Our mother didn’t recognize us any more. Her mind was gone. She had aged terribly, her nose was red from a drug she had to take, and I remember Babbo telling Francis and me, “How I wish you had known your mother when she was young and beautiful.”

When she finally died, all the color was drained out of her face and I remember being startled that she looked young again and extraordinarily handsome lying there. That first night I offered to sleep in the same room as Francis, but he said it wasn’t necessary.

My mother’s body was cremated and there was a big, fancy funeral at Calvary Church in New York. Afterwards we all went up to Stock-bridge. Babbo walked down the village street to the Sedgwick Pie carrying my mother’s ashes in a green student’s bag. He chose two quotations for her tombstone: “Some lives bend over other lives as the heavens bend over the earth.” The other was from Dante:
“Beatrice in suso, ed io in lei, guardava,”
which translates: “Beatrice was gazing upward, and I on her.”

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 My grandmother’s death was an unbelievable strain on my father. He finally had a nervous breakdown and it was recommended that he leave Groton. Babbo sent him out to Santa Barbara to the Cate School, which was run by a remarkable pair, Curtis Cate and his wife, Katherine Thayer. Bostonians often sent their children to the Cate School. Katherine Cate was what you would call a character. My father used to tell a story about her when she was a younger woman living in Boston. She had gone to a dinner party, and when the ladies were alone having their coffee, she grew bored. She was wearing a long dress with a fishtail in the fashion of the day, and she tucked that fishtail between her ankles and stood on her head!

By the time I knew Mrs. Cate she was a tiny, erect lady whose most remarkable feature was her voice, a kind of
basso profundo
bark. My father said she used to have to insist over the phone that she was not
Mr.
Cate.

Curtis Cate was a scholarly man who believed in Spartan discipline,
tempered by a sense of humor. The atmosphere of the school was much less formal and competitive than Groton’s. There was a lot of riding rather than team sports. It was perfect for my father. He was the
only
Duke. According to Uncle Minturn, my father put on twenty pounds in the first six months; he was so happy he stayed there for two and a half years, working summers on a ranch nearby.

HARRY SEDGWICK
 But then, after the Cate School, Uncle Francis went to Harvard. He was back in the competitive furnace. Babbo always said that the two essential things to do at Harvard were to play football and to join the Porcellian Club. He himself had played on one of the earliest football teams, in 1878. My father, Minturn, was always a great athlete—at his birth the family doctor said, This boy doesn’t need a nanny, he needs a trainer.” He made quite a record at Harvard. He had played for a team that never lost a game. In his senior year, after the Princeton-Harvard game, the sports page of the Boston
Globe
read
SEDGWICK TURNS TIDE
. Babbo was proud of being introduced as “the father of Duke Sedgwick.”

So Uncle Francis had quite a name to live up to at Harvard. He hated the name Francis, and clung to “Duke” for the rest of his life. In fact, thirty-odd years later at his twenty-fifth Harvard reunion, he and Dad actually quarreled over who was the
real
Duke. Dad told him, “You wI’ll always be little Duke.’”

In his freshman year Uncle Francis went out for football and crew, and while he made the football team, he got I’ll that spring and was dropped from the crew. He took six courses that first year and got A’s in all of them. In his sophomore year he was awarded the Jacob Wendell Scholarship, and Babbo took him to Europe as a reward. But in all his years at Harvard he never won a single H. He kept trying, forcing himself, building up his body to such a degree that some of his Porcellian Club classmates referred to him as “Physical Francis.”

It was a tradition in the Sedgwick family to belong to the Porcellian Club. Babbo had been a member, and even Judge Theodore Sedgwick, the one at the center of the family graveyard, had been elected an honorary member just before he died, one of the very few Yale men so chosen. Uncle Francis was invited to join, and he accepted. But although I’ve heard that he later considered the club an important part of his life, another member told me that he rarely went there and that when he did, nobody seemed to notice him. He was sort of a vacant spot in the room.

Francis with his parents