Edie Read Free

found it comforting when they accepted him.
    The Sedgwick my father was most impressed by was Minturn Sedgwick, and that for his athletic prowess—he was a Harvard legend. He was on the team that won the Rose Bowl against Oregon. When I was a little boy running around between people’s legs at a cocktail party, I remember my father calling out, “Minturn, show us how you did it”—really terribly interested—and he’d go on, “Minturn, how did you get down there and
crouch
in the line, I mean when you were playing against Princeton, what position did you assume? How did you charge?” . . . and they’d get Minturn down in his football stance at that party, charging up and down among the guests standing there drinking cocktails.
    Of course, my father wasn’t above getting some mileage out of the Sedgwicks for his books—the Sedgwick Pie, for example. In
The Late George Apley
there’s an old-maid cousin, a distant family connection named Hattie, who gets buried in the wrong place in the family plot, indeed in what George Apley considers his
own
segment, and there’s quite a lot of correspondence about whether Cousin Hattie shouldn’t be dug up and moved to where she might more properly belong. I don’t know what the Sedgwicks made of this fun at their expense—it didn’t keep Ellery from asking father to those Somerset lunches. But Ellery was a very smart man.
    HARRY SEDGWICK  Ellery was a dominating, difficult, and exciting man, lacking none of that outstanding Sedgwick male quality, charm. He was very different from his older brother, Babbo, who was Edie’s and my grandfather: Babbo the dandy, the scholar, epicurean, lover of beautiful countries—France, Spain, and Greece—beautiful literature, and, last but by no means least, beautiful women. Ellery was the hard-headed, tough businessman. Though his business was literature, he always knew how to get things done, understood the workings of power, and always had his eye on the “bottom line.” Ellery’s second wife, Marjorie, put it very well: “Your grandfather Babbo was the most charming man that ever lived, but your uncle Ellery has more solid virtues.”
    Babbo lived until he was ninety-five. He could remember people shouting in the streets of Stockbridge that Abraham Lincoln had been shot. He was especially anxious to outlive his Harvard classmate Godfrey Cabot—known to his Cabot nephews and nieces as Uncle God—who was a teetotaler. Babbo always referred to him as a “disgrace to the class of ’82,” and worried that if Cabot outlived his classmates he would credit abstinence from alcohol as the reason. I remember hearing about a class dinner at which five of them turned up. There they were, these wonderful old Harvard men in their nineties gathering for a reunion supper, and Cabot, who was the secretary of the class, had, of course, ordered no wine. This was more than Babbo could bear. He stood up on a chair and called out, “Champagne!” He reported afterwards that one of his elderly classmates, a man he could not recall having ever met before, looked over and said, “I’m
so
glad you came.”
    There was a family rumor that Babbo had been offered the editorship of the
Atlantic
before his younger brother, Ellery. True or not, the
Atlantic
got the right man. Babbo was not a man of affairs, at least of a business nature. He practiced law in New York for nearly fifteen years and gave it up. He wrote about it: “I was mentally and morally uncomfortable, as if I were swimming in glue. I did not understand the law. It seemed to me to create most of the difficulties it professed to settle.”
    Life must not have been easy for Babbo then. His courtship of my grandmother was not going well. She had declined his offer of marriage. He said, “I can’t take it any longer.” He bought ammunition, went back to his law offices, wrote farewell letters, and started to load the gun. The ammunition wouldn’t fit. He never knew if the clerk in the gun