sitting at the piano was a little boy from Peru, Indiana, in a checked suit and a salmon tie, with his hair parted in the middle and slicked down, looking just like a Westerner all dressed up for the East.”
Gerald, who was already something of a dandy—a photograph taken at the time shows him in a batik jacket, ascot, silk sash, and solar topee, the very image of the pukka sahib—decided to overlook the checked suit and loud tie. He discovered that Porter shared his passion for Gilbert and Sullivan, and they had a long chat about music that somehow segued into a recitation of Porter’s life story. By the time Gerald had heard all the details of Porter’s childhood on an apple farm, not to mention the lyrics of “Bulldog,” the ditty Porter had just submitted for the football song competition, this rather unlikely pair had cemented a lifetime friendship. Perhaps each saw in the other what he kept so carefully hidden from others: the soul of an outsider concealed behind a facade of urbanity.
Gerald got Porter elected to DKE , and to the Apollo Glee Club (in which both boys sang second tenor). That winter he also managed to persuade the officers of the combined Glee, Banjo, and Mandolin clubs to allow Porter, a lowly sophomore, a solo spot in their winter tour so he could sing a song he’d written in praise of motorcars: the sight of the diminutive Porter backed by the rest of the glee club humming “Zoom, zoom, zoom,” brought down the house.
Although the Glee Club appeared at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York during its tour, the Wiborg girls didn’t come to the concert; they were preparing to leave for an extended European trip that would keep them abroad for nearly six months. But Gerald hadn’t lost touch with them. On the contrary, he had become an even closer family initiate, although his friendship with Hoytie had cooled somewhat. It was with Sara that he had developed a new closeness: during the summer, he had spent days at a time at the Dunes, and the two of them had gardened and done chores (Gerald painted and varnished the porch chairs), or gone walking or driving together, or read Emerson aloud to each other in the evenings. And when it came time for the Yale junior prom (for which Gerald was one of the eight organizers), Sara was the girl he asked to accompany him.
At twenty-seven, Sara Wiborg was emphatically not one of the dewy debutantes his classmates swooned over. In a way that was the point. She was an unconventional choice: not a beautiful girl, but a beautiful woman. Up to now, with the exception of Hoytie, Gerald had had no real flirtations. With girls he was charming but not threatening—his friend Gardner called him “Galahad the Pure”—the boy all the mothers loved because he was at ease with them while he was impartially, and politely, attentive to their daughters. Whether this impartiality meant he was indifferent to them is debatable. Whatever the nature of the “defect” he had discerned in himself at Hotchkiss—and despite the fact that many of his Yale friends, such as Woolley, Hanna, and Porter, were homosexual—Gerald’s sexual preferences were far from clear, even to himself. What was clear was that he had spent twenty-two years in a cold, withholding family, trying, not always successfully, to live up to someone else’s expectations. By taking twenty-seven-year-old Sara Wiborg—who had been presented at court, who was a society sensation on two continents—to the Yale junior prom, he not only trumped everyone else’s aces, he changed the game entirely.
But there was something else going on. With Sara, increasingly, Gerald felt he could let down his guard. Well traveled, well read, she was someone with whom he could discuss Emerson or music. She shared his sense of the absurd, collecting peculiar or pompous phrases she had overheard and sending them to him for his amusement. Most interesting to someone as wary and contained as Gerald had become, and most unsettling,
Gerald, who was already something of a dandy—a photograph taken at the time shows him in a batik jacket, ascot, silk sash, and solar topee, the very image of the pukka sahib—decided to overlook the checked suit and loud tie. He discovered that Porter shared his passion for Gilbert and Sullivan, and they had a long chat about music that somehow segued into a recitation of Porter’s life story. By the time Gerald had heard all the details of Porter’s childhood on an apple farm, not to mention the lyrics of “Bulldog,” the ditty Porter had just submitted for the football song competition, this rather unlikely pair had cemented a lifetime friendship. Perhaps each saw in the other what he kept so carefully hidden from others: the soul of an outsider concealed behind a facade of urbanity.
Gerald got Porter elected to DKE , and to the Apollo Glee Club (in which both boys sang second tenor). That winter he also managed to persuade the officers of the combined Glee, Banjo, and Mandolin clubs to allow Porter, a lowly sophomore, a solo spot in their winter tour so he could sing a song he’d written in praise of motorcars: the sight of the diminutive Porter backed by the rest of the glee club humming “Zoom, zoom, zoom,” brought down the house.
Although the Glee Club appeared at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York during its tour, the Wiborg girls didn’t come to the concert; they were preparing to leave for an extended European trip that would keep them abroad for nearly six months. But Gerald hadn’t lost touch with them. On the contrary, he had become an even closer family initiate, although his friendship with Hoytie had cooled somewhat. It was with Sara that he had developed a new closeness: during the summer, he had spent days at a time at the Dunes, and the two of them had gardened and done chores (Gerald painted and varnished the porch chairs), or gone walking or driving together, or read Emerson aloud to each other in the evenings. And when it came time for the Yale junior prom (for which Gerald was one of the eight organizers), Sara was the girl he asked to accompany him.
At twenty-seven, Sara Wiborg was emphatically not one of the dewy debutantes his classmates swooned over. In a way that was the point. She was an unconventional choice: not a beautiful girl, but a beautiful woman. Up to now, with the exception of Hoytie, Gerald had had no real flirtations. With girls he was charming but not threatening—his friend Gardner called him “Galahad the Pure”—the boy all the mothers loved because he was at ease with them while he was impartially, and politely, attentive to their daughters. Whether this impartiality meant he was indifferent to them is debatable. Whatever the nature of the “defect” he had discerned in himself at Hotchkiss—and despite the fact that many of his Yale friends, such as Woolley, Hanna, and Porter, were homosexual—Gerald’s sexual preferences were far from clear, even to himself. What was clear was that he had spent twenty-two years in a cold, withholding family, trying, not always successfully, to live up to someone else’s expectations. By taking twenty-seven-year-old Sara Wiborg—who had been presented at court, who was a society sensation on two continents—to the Yale junior prom, he not only trumped everyone else’s aces, he changed the game entirely.
But there was something else going on. With Sara, increasingly, Gerald felt he could let down his guard. Well traveled, well read, she was someone with whom he could discuss Emerson or music. She shared his sense of the absurd, collecting peculiar or pompous phrases she had overheard and sending them to him for his amusement. Most interesting to someone as wary and contained as Gerald had become, and most unsettling,
Similar Books
