Real Lace by Stephen; Birmingham

deeds were, he carefully explained to his children, Corporal Works of Mercy—caring for the hungry and the needy and the orphaned and imprisoned. Whenever a board meeting at one of his companies was ended, he liked to close the proceedings with a song. In return, his board memberssang for him, and children at the local parochial schools always appeared on the doorstep of the Murray mansion on Christmas Eve to serenade Tom Murray.
    He enjoyed taking his children for outings at the theater or to the opera in New York, and the minute the group was settled in the back seat of the big chauffeur-driven car, and it was ready to pull away from the house, Mr. Murray would remove his beads from his vest pocket and, in a solemn and stentorian voice, would begin to recite the rosary, intoning, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible … and in Jesus Christ, His only son …” announcing all the Mysteries as he came to them, delivering a full ten Hail Marys at the appropriate intervals, pausing to cross himself whenever the car passed a church or a cemetery. The recital continued all the way into Manhattan. The children’s Protestant friends were always somewhat baffled by these performances. And yet he considered this a vital ritual, and before any of the family started on a trip, or went into the water, there were prayers and blessings, and everyone was expected to cross himself. He had made, he liked to explain, only two trips to Europe in his life, and both times they had been pilgrimages to Catholic shrines. He also gave his children practical advice—particularly in the field he knew best, electricity. He lectured on how crucial electricity was to the life of New York City, how the city depended on it, and he was one of the first in the field to warn of the dangers—on city streets, where electricity controlled traffic and provided illumination, in apartment houses with electrically run elevators, in hospitals where electrical equipment kept patients alive—of massive blackouts that could occur if systems became overloaded. Long after his death, New Yorkers began to have firsthand experience of what Tom Murray had been talking about.
    â€œThomas Edison’s invention may have been more spectacular and showy,” one of his grandchildren says, “with the incandescentbulb. But Grandpa Murray virtually invented everything but the light bulb—the circuits, switches, dynamos, and power systems that got the electricity to the bulb. In my opinion, it was a more important contribution. After all, if there hadn’t been a way to get the power into the bulbs, how would the bulbs light up?”
    Meanwhile, Mr. Murray’s children were steadily making their way into New York society. Mr. Murray rather liked and encouraged this, and enjoyed clipping items from society columns about his children’s appearances at this or that “swell” party in Manhattan. In this preoccupation he was, again, very Irish-American. American Jews kept to themselves, and tended to shun “society” and actively to avoid seeing their names in the papers. But America’s emergent Irish families were proving themselves a socially ambitious lot, bringing with them a strong sense of pride in their Irish heritage—as, whenever an Irish or Irish-sounding name was mentioned to one Boston dowager, she would always comment, “Well, if they were one of the First Irish Families, I would certainly know them.”
    The Murray children were indeed attractive, and had the three prerequisites that are still needed for acceptance in society in New York: money, good looks, and good humor, which rank in importance in that order. The second-generation Murrays were all at once very social.
    â€œYes, I suppose you could say they were accepted,” says one member of New York’s Protestant Old Guard. “But you always knew that