The Late John Marquand

The Late John Marquand by Stephen; Birmingham Page A

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Authors: Stephen; Birmingham
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impractical, incapable of coping with the realities of life. She had led what is called asheltered existence, and much of its shelter was the creation of her own personality. Sometimes she seemed to be living on another star.
    She never, for instance, seemed to know quite where she was. She would go out for a walk and soon find herself lost and, when she asked for directions and these were pointed out to her, she would smile sweetly and then turn and walk dreamily the opposite way. Her ethereal vagueness could be both endearing and exasperating, for in addition to being vague she was also forgetful. She would forget invitations and show up in the wrong places for appointments. She would make dates with Marquand and then fail to appear. He began proposing marriage to her soon after their first meeting, and sometimes she would accept his proposals and sometimes she would demur. When she accepted, she would have forgotten the acceptance a day later. Everything about Christina was haphazard and disorganized. One afternoon she was seen walking on Beacon Hill and holding one end of what was clearly a dog’s leash, apparently quite unaware that no dog was attached to the other end. Once in a restaurant she was observed carefully gathering up three gloves. She was a child-woman who had to be guided and led, and in this capacity she had always been served by her mother, Mrs. Alexander C. Sedgwick of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
    Perhaps it was Christina’s Princess Lointaine quality that supported John Marquand’s feeling from the beginning that, socially, he was from the wrong side of the tracks. Certainly his Marquand-Fuller lineage was every bit as distinguished as Christina’s. Still, she was a Sedgwick, and John Marquand was very much aware that, as they say in New England, “Sedgwicks are Sedgwicks.” Sedgwick House in Stockbridge, the family seat, is an imposing yellow house that addresses a wide elm-shaded lawn facing Main Street, a local landmark pointed out with pride to visitors. In the Stockbridge Church the Sedgwick pews are placed in a chancel so that Sedgwicks can sit above everybody else. Beyond the church lies the Sedgwick burial plot, a circular piece of real estate known as the Sedgwick Pie. At the center of the Pie reposes an ancient ancestor, Judge Theodore Sedgwick, and around him lie all the other Sedgwicks, their heads away from the center in order that, at the sound of the last trump, all the Sedgwicks may rise and face Judge Theodore who, it is assumed, will have a verdict of his ownto deliver to each of them. The Sedgwick servants, meanwhile, are buried separately, “below the salt.” So seriously are the Sedgwicks taken in Stockbridge that it is said that in spring all the peeping frogs in the local ponds chirp “Sedgwick, Sedgwick, Sedgwick.”
    Though most Sedgwicks are comfortably off, there is no Sedgwick family fortune, as such, to speak of. But the Sedgwicks have long represented other things in Boston. More than money, they have stood for intellectual achievement, civic rectitude, cultural responsibility—qualities which traditional Boston has always admired. Sedgwicks have provided Boston with scholars, teachers, essayists, poets, clergymen. They have, meanwhile, not been shy about marrying money, and several Sedgwicks have married Cabots and Peabodys. Perhaps the most important fact about the Sedgwicks, as far as young John Marquand was concerned, was that Christina’s uncle, Ellery Sedgwick, was then the editor of the Atlantic Monthly , the only magazine that proper Boston deigned to read and take seriously. In Boston, when one spoke of the Magazine, one meant the Atlantic Monthly , just as to speak of the President did not mean the occupant of the White House but the head of Harvard. To Marquand, a hack reporter for a daily newspaper, the presence of the great editor of the Magazine in Christina’s family tree was awesome. Uncle Ellery, who set the

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