Caresse Crosby Page 6

  On December 9, Harry finally turned up in Room 2707, and Henrietta Crosby checked in across the hall. The next morning he made a cryptic entry in his diary: “One is not in love unless one desires to die with one’s beloved . . . there is only one happiness; It is to love and be loved.”

  Harry’s appetite was never satiated. After a feast of lovemaking with Caresse, the early sun dazzled the windows of their room, and Harry, the sun worshipper, whispered:

  “Give me your hand, Caresse. Our window is open wide. Let’s meet the Sun-Death together!”

  “But why, Harry? We have so much to live for.”

  “That is why, Caresse. There is too much. I cannot endure it all.”

  “We mustn’t!” Caresse answered. “No, But we must leave here, very soon.”

  A premonition cast a brief shadow over the morning sun. But Harry always mixed talk of death and love. After the War, he wrote:

  “I ponder death more frequently than I do any other subject, even in the most joyous and flourishing moments of my life.” His letters to Caresse were full of that fixation: “I promise with the absolute Faith that we shall be One in Heaven . . . someday Darling,” was a typical closing. “I pray that we shall die together. I can think of nothing more sacred or beautiful.”

  Caresse remembered—to the last day of her own life—that she had turned down Harry’s proffered invitation to die. But that day, she had a full schedule of living ahead. She first went to the travel bureau to book their return passage to France on December 13. Then, she rushed off to meet Harry at the gallery on 57th Street where their friend Kay Lane’s sculpture of Narcisse Noir was attracting the attention of critics.

  Harry had reached there first.

  “Kiss me, Caresse, before I go,” he said. With his left hand, he took off the big horn-rimmed glasses he always wore, and in a characteristic gesture, leaned across Narcisse’s bronze flank to kiss her. He nodded goodbye, and swift as an eagle was gone.

  At five o’clock, Caresse met Henrietta at the Savoy to go to Uncle Jack’s for tea, an appointment made by Harry several weeks before. Harry had chosen as a Christmas remembrance a volume that must have caused his uncle amusement—if not further disenchantment. It was a presentation copy of the Black Sun limited edition of Sleeping Together. In spite of the financial holocaust and the incongruous gift, Morgan received the two women warmly. But at 6:15, when Harry hadn’t appeared, they politely took their leave and went back to the hotel.

  It was unlike Harry. “We were restless out of one another’s sight,” Caresse admitted. “Harry was forever telephoning to tell me where he was, and neither of us came late to a rendezvous with each other.” Caresse and Henrietta were due to meet Hart Crane at the Caviar Restaurant at 7:30 that evening. On December 7, Hart had given the farewell party for the Crosbys at his Brooklyn Heights apartment, in direct view of the bridge. Some of their old friends were included, but it was planned to introduce the Crosbys as publishers of The Bridge to some of the literary lights on the New York scene—E. E. cummings, William Carlos Williams, the Malcolm Cowleys, and Walker Evans, the photographer who recorded the event. When the party wound down, one of the guests, quite drunk, asked Harry to pick a card from the deck. There was a silent moment before Harry spoke—“Ace of Hearts”—and picked. The Ace of Hearts.

  On December 8, Josephine Rotch Bigelow hand-carried an envelope to the Savoy Plaza. The “impatient” Fire Princess was known locally as a “strange wild girl who delighted in saying things to shock people.” Yet only the summer before, at 18, she had married Albert Bigelow, a graduate student of architecture at Harvard and scion of a conservative Boston family, in an impressive society wedding. Bigelow remained stolidly unaware of his bride’s liaison with Harry while traveling in Venice the year before. Harry had introduced her to the opium pipe; she had an ugly temper and mad fits of jealousy. When they made love, Harry confided to his diary, “It was madness, like cats in the night that howl, no longer knowing whether they are in hell or Paradise.” He told Hart Crane that he was already growing tired of her.

  The crumpled contents of a yellowed envelope are among Caresse’s carefully preserved papers. A juvenile 36-line poem, “Two Fires that Make One Fire”—an inventory of the enthusiasms Harry shared with the Fire Princess, ends on an ominous chord: “Death is our marriage.” The note attached encapsulated its clear message, “Harry, do you know I love you terribly?” (Caresse noted in faltering hand: “This is the letter Josephine brought Harry the night before . . . she had not left town as she promised.”)

  When Caresse and Henrietta Crosby arrived at the Caviar to meet Crane, Harry was not there and had left no message. They exchanged pleasantries during the first course; then Caresse excused herself to call Stanley Mortimer, the painter, an old friend of Harry’s. A telephone call was decidedly against the rules of the game, but she was worried and suspected Harry had gone to Stanley’s studio, his usual site for a rendezvous. Only the devil—or death—could prevent Harry from keeping a firm date with Caresse and his mother.

  They discovered Harry and Josephine lying together in the upstairs bedroom off Mortimer’s studio, fully and fashionably dressed, except for their bare feet. The police report noted Harry’s soles, tattooed on the voyage to Egypt with a Christian cross on the left, a pagan sun symbol on the right. Both had beautiful skin like parchment, and eyes sunk beneath strong brows, sensuous mouths with full lips, her dark still-damp curls contrasting with Harry’s ripewheat shock. Harry’s free arm was wrapped around Josephine’s neck, their left hands clasped, like a tableau of a fairy tale Prince and Princess. The Jazz Age Romeo and Juliet appeared to have supped from the same fatal love potion to lie for eternity on Harry’s Lit de Mort:

  I shall die within my Lady’s arms

  and from her mouth, drink down the purple wine.

  In reality, an almost imperceptible bullet hole had pierced his right temple, her left. The Hounds’ flask, half empty, lay by Harry’s side, next to his small pearl-handled revolver. The gold Sun Ring, Caresse’s wedding gift to Harry, was discovered later on the bedroom floor, stomped flat. Josephine had gone first—the coroner reported—Harry followed several hours later. One can only surmise what took place during the several hours when Harry lay alone beside the beautiful, inert girl, trying to find a clue in her silent body to the Summum Amor that awaited him.

  E.E. Cummings wrote an appropriate epitaph:

  2 Boston

  Dolls; found

  with

  Holes in each other

  ’s lullaby . . .

  The yellowed clippings in newspaper morgues are as obscure today as the event they headlined:

  SUICIDE PACT EVIDENT: CROSBY POEMS CLEW

  A week later, the story was dropped, save for a discreet notice about Josephine’s interment in Boston.

  Fifty years later, Polleen insisted that “in spite of Harry’s crazy ways—crazed by opium and intoxicated with champagne—I am certain that murder was not in his making. More likely, the unstable Bigelow woman called Harry’s bluff, then killed herself. Since there was no other way out of this grim situation, Harry took his own life.”

  “All the dancing figures of a world in rainbow colors froze.” Caresse passed through all of the classic symptoms of bereavement: disbelief, denial, grief, and, finally, acceptance. Harry had gone—without leaving a clue, an explanation.

  “My puzzle was to know what Harry expected of me? Should I follow him?” (Caresse would not read the police report; she never believed the destruction of the Sun Ring.) According to Kay Boyle, “. . . she was too uncertain of herself, too lost to be able to sort it all out. She existed—with her wonderfully human responses and inexhaustible energy—in the nightmare Harry had lived in, this terrible, terrible hell of his making.”

  Caresse finally rationalized that no word at all from Harry was the only way to assure her that they were still and f
orever, Harry and Caresse. “To explain would have been to destroy. Only his supreme faith in me could have made this departure without words justified. With that as my life raft, I pulled myself back out of the depths into the light again.”

  As the shadows lifted, she could see again into places that once had been so dazzlingly bright: “One Way Like the Path of a Star.” “Harry’s life, for me, burnt far too quickly, but one cannot say that it burnt in vain or that its Summum is unrelated to the law of cosmic progression. It had truth, it had beauty, and for me, it pointed a way that I now believe is the path of every life on earth.”

  Archibald MacLeish—who sat the death watch with Harry, at Caresse’s request—wrote to Henrietta Crosby: “Those of us who knew Harry, knew that he was always . . . on the side of the angels and against the authority and numbness and complacency of life. . . . Recklessness and freedom of soul are sometimes dangerous . . . but without those fires lighted . . . the world would be a dark and hopeless place.”

  Some 20 years later, Caresse sent an unusual essay to Charles Olson, the poet: “In Defense of Suicide, or Planned Death.” In it, she reconciled “the many years I was unable to reexamine my faith in voluntary death.”

  Harry Crosby willed himself to die, and I, who was his wife . . . watching this will of his develop into consummation, have come to accept, in the years between, the value of the rightness of his act. During the seven years of an unbelievably perfect marriage [sic], both consciously and subconsciously, I accepted suicide as the Summum Amor to which I was ardently dedicated, and for which I promised I was waiting, though never fully convinced and never quite ready. [emphasis added]. It was to be the almost too beautiful rebellion . . . the answer of sex to spirit and spirit to the unknown—the full transition into love eternal . . . I was momentarily robbed. . . . But I know now that every man has the right to take his own life; “to die at the right time.”

  Let each of us be given 70 years at birth—7, as a magical number, and 0, the full circle, as absolute. These years are given to us to mold, to strengthen, to beautify . . . to live each day as though it were our last . . . every hour of life, whether in study, work or rest will be significant . . . the final, or 70th anniversary of our birth will be a great day of rejoicing. . . .

  Chapter V

  BORN TO MYSELF

  “For me, events of last year or yesterday have lost their content . . . only persons are memorable.”

  —Caresse

  At first light on April 20, 1892, Mary Phelps Jacob of New York was born. An Aries baby, she puckered up her crimson face and commanded attention, even while her proud father was still passing out cigars.

  The name Jacob is derived from the Jacobeans, who—after the War of Roses—settled into Chale Abbey on the Isle of Wight. Like his father before him, William Jacob was a quiet man, who inherited an islander’s love of silence. Unfortunately, he did not fall heir to his father’s business acumen. Mary’s Grandfather Jacob had arrived in America with no fortune but the good sense to marry an American heiress, Emma Lawrence. The then-popular brougham was the specialty of Riker Lawrence, manufacturer of gentlemen’s carriages. Riker also had the vision to acquire large tracts of Manhattan real estate. But his carefully acquired reserves dwindled away with the advent of the horseless carriage, and his shortsighted sons considered the midtown property worthless, and disposed of it as soon as they inherited it.

  “Poor father never liked being a businessman,” his daughter Mary commented many years later. “He was an idealist who wrapped himself in a mantle of silence because the real world never lived up to his expectations.” Most of the projects William Jacob believed in were dismissed by his stern, New England-born wife, Mary Phelps, as “Will’s crazy ideas.”

  Named after her mother, young Mary numbered among her distinguished ancestors the first Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Bradford, and Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat. Four generations later, her Grandfather Phelps inherited a coal and iron business in Irontown, Connecticut, and firmly established, consolidated his position by marrying Eliza Schenk of Philadelphia, a daughter of the first U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James. As a youth, Phelps had led the Irontown Brigade at the Battle of Antietam; his dress sword hung in the Jacob living room under a handsome, tinted daguerrotype in full regimentals. Mary later observed: “This may account for [mother’s] belligerent and caustic spirit. She was difficult to persuade and impossible to fool—she never avoided an issue.” “Stupid” was the word that Mary Jacob used most often. It stung her children to the marrow, and to Mary, she added, “You’re just like your father,” as reproof. But the oval face—a cameo framed in a delicate widow’s peak of dark hair, beautiful by candlelight—belied the inner strength of an unbending woman. Walter Jacob was her victim from the day they met at a midwinter skating party; he was in love with her until the day he died.

  Hard and practical, yet an idealistic dreamer, was the child born of this union. At the time of Mary’s birth, the Jacobs lived on the corner of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, in a comfortable family brownstone on an expensive plot of land now occupied by the Plaza Hotel.

  “I was the first child, I should have hated not to be,” Mary noted. “I’ll never forget the day I was born—born to myself, that is.” She remembered the feel of soft snowflakes melting on her cheeks as, tucked inside a fur lap-robe, she was pushed by her devoted nanny around the edges of the duck pond in Central Park in an elegant Brewster baby sleigh of white enamel. Other early memories mingle with the faint aroma of baking pistachio cake, the scent of her grandfather’s Andalusian sherry, of silver polish and Mark Cross saddle soap; “a world where only good smells exist.”

  Nicknamed “Polly” by her grandparents, she walked earlier and talked earlier than most babies, and at five, she was already lording it over Leonard (Len), only three, when the baby Walter (Buddy) was born. In the earliest photo of the three siblings, dressed in white, Mary shows the responsible look of an older sister who encouraged her younger brothers in fresh Christopher Robin haircuts to hold still and face the camera.

  “As a child, I lived almost completely in a world of make-believe,” she remembered. Summers were spent at East Island “in a cottage built entirely of pink and saffron-colored seashells; the encrusted white plaster appeared as a fine mosaic, glowing red when the sunset struck across Long Island Sound.” One mystical experience marred the idyll of endless summer days. Mary was lying flat on her stomach, fishing for minnows on the wharf, holding tight to the handle of a cumbersome bait hook, when she was dragged deep into the stream. Len, who was fishing nearby, also on his stomach, spotted his sister going under and braced himself to grab an ankle. Mary’s head was being sucked under when her gentle Papa heard Len’s shout and rushed to the other end of the pier. He hauled Mary out by both feet, while the heroic Len ran up the hill to tell Mama to call the Fire Department Rescue Squad. As Mary later described the experience:

  Into my ears the waters poured strange sea lullabies . . . not only did I see and hear harmony, but I understood everything . . . and I watched my father at work on his boat, my brother, deathly frightened, hanging onto my spindly heels, and I, my hair like seaweed, pulled flat against the submerged bottom of the float. Thus, while I drowned, I saw my father turn and act . . . I saw the efforts to bring me back to life, and I tried not to come back.

  There was no sadness or sickness from which I wished to escape. I was only seven, and a carefree child, yet that moment in all my life has never been equalled for pure happiness. Could I have glimpsed, while drowned (for I was drowned!) the freedom of eternal life? One thing I know, that Nirvana does exist between here and the hereafter—for I have been there.

  For the most part, her early life was that of a typical upper-middle-class family at the turn of the century. The female children lived in a sheltered world of nannies and governesses. Mary was no exception. In the winter, little girls were fitte
d and fussed over by family seamstresses. “We were always completely clothed, even on beaches,” she remembered. “To wear a sunsuit next to one’s skin or to drive or ride without a coat and hat and gloves was unheard of.” The Gibson Girl was the prototype of Mary’s mother and aunts, who wore their hair piled high in pompadours, with sailor hats skewered on with devilish hatpins. Starched collars with bow ties fastened their finely pleated shirtwaists. In a Charles Dana Gibson photograph of 1904, Mary appears in a well-cut tan velveteen coat trimmed with a large Irish lace collar; a floppy hat with layer upon layer of accordion-pleated black chiffon was held firmly under the chin by an elastic band. She was also the subject of a Gibson sketch, as a member of The Younger Generation, being pulled along Fifth Avenue by an enormous St. Bernard dog with a governess at her heels.

  In fall 1900, Mary’s Aunt Annie and Uncle Will Barnum decided that Ben, their delicate and sensitive only child, was to be educated at home by Miss Kimber, a young English governess of good family who came to New York to seek her fortune. Mary was invited to “Windward,” the Barnum manor house, to be Ben’s companion and weekday boarder.

  “I could not have been at Windward long when the most exciting event of my life took place. I learned to read.” She carried a book everywhere, and rushed through meals to get back to it. She awoke early to read before breakfast. When headaches became a problem, she was forbidden to read more than one hour a day, after supper. (Headstrong Mary smuggled books into the bathroom and stayed there for long intervals.) Thus began her lifelong addiction to books, as a childhood escape from a restrictive environment. “My own world was snug around me like a chrysalis, but the vista before me had no bounds or limits,” Mary wrote.