Personal History (24 page)

We drove down Route I and arrived at the stone house that Phil’s parents had built when Bill was born. The farm itself looked large and prosperous, but flat and sandy, where the Everglades’ swamps had been developed and drained into ditches and canals. We stayed at the house with Phil’s father; his stepmother, Hilda, whom Ernie had married in 1936; and his very young half-brother, Bob, their somewhat spoiled only child.

It was not an easy meeting for them or for me. Hilda was charming, warm, and welcoming. Ernie studied me over the top of his newspaper. He was shy but did his best to be jovial and affectionate. One day, when I was lying on the couch in the living room writing thank-you notes, I was startled to be spat on by the three-year-old Bob. Phil’s brother, Bill, later told me that this was, alas, Bob’s habit at that point in his life. I thought, in my paranoid way, that there must be a message there. Bob outgrew all this, of course, and developed into a highly successful, natural, and excellent politician, very different from the older three children but extremely able. He became governor of Florida and is now senator, a strange fulfillment of both his father’s and Phil’s ambitions. He has all the Graham family brains and charisma, and a great deal more stability than Phil had.

Miami was difficult for me for many reasons. It was Southern, and no one had ever suggested to me that the South was still significantly different from the rest of the country—certainly more sexist in atmosphere. Women lunched with each other and talked household problems, which I was still unaware existed. I was tremendously reassured at lunch with my old Washington friend Mary Cootes Belin, whose husband was in Florida working for Pan American Airlines, when she told me that she, too, knew nothing about vacuum cleaners and washing machines.

I tried, and Phil’s family and friends tried, but the reality was that I knew nothing about farming or about Florida politics, which were the bonds between Phil and his father. Still, I worked hard at being interested as we drove around the farm looking at the cows and the crops.

Phil’s college friends seemed unlike anyone I knew, and I didn’t know how to relate to them. One of our more traumatic evenings was spent on a Chamber of Commerce boat ride with some of these old friends. This was a double cultural shock, for I had never encountered a Chamber of Commerce group before, much less the one in Miami, then still a comparatively small town. We played a game called “sniff” in which a cigarette-wrapper paper was passed from nose to nose—you had to keep it up by inhaling until you passed it on; if you let it drop, you had to kiss the man with whom the catastrophe occurred. It was a modified version of the kids’ game of post office. This strange game reduced me to total pulp. I didn’t know whether to laugh it off or engage in it. Today, of course, I see that I was ridiculously uptight and shy, but then I couldn’t help wondering if I was going to be spending the rest of my life playing sniff with the Chamber of Commerce. I wept on the way home out of worry and fear that I couldn’t cope. Phil stopped the car, hugged me, and told me not to worry—these were his old friends, but he too had grown away from them; he loved them but no longer saw much of them, and we wouldn’t be doing this kind of thing forever. I recovered and we survived the rest of the three-week visit, and eventually some of the main figures from his Miami youth became my good friends and stayed so.

While we were in Florida, I also met Mary, Phil’s sister, who adored him. Mary had a needlessly hard life. She was very gifted and bright but not beautiful. She had wanted to go north to a dress-design school and was not allowed to go. She also had a much older beau whom she loved but wasn’t allowed to marry. I suppose it might have been different had her mother lived. Mary was difficult about her stepmother, Hilda, who was not much older than she, and whom Ernie had met on a bus trip shortly after his first wife’s death. Mary fought the idea of the marriage and fought with Hilda. Phil had his own reservations, but as usual was the peacemaker in the situation and supported Hilda, who was awfully nice. Ernie needed her, and I got along well with her.

While we were in Florida, Phil received a birthday letter from my mother, telling him how happy she was that he and I were married and how she had never dreamed she could accept someone so “spontaneously into our mystic circle.” She also wrote:

We started back north on August 1 and arrived in Washington a few days later. We stayed at Crescent Place until the furniture I had so carefully chosen with my mother arrived at our new house at 1814 37th Street, and then, in the late summer of 1940, we began our married life together in our first home.

W
E QUICKLY AND EASILY
settled into our little house, which we rented unfurnished for $80 a month. The house—just outside Georgetown, behind Western High School—was in a pleasant, convenient, unpretentious neighborhood of row houses called Burleith. It had a tiny living room into which you walked immediately on entering, a dining room, and a small kitchen. On the second floor was a nice bedroom over the living room and two little rooms that became studies for each of us. There was a daybed for guests in Phil’s study. At the back of the house was a screened-in porch and a postage-stamp yard—taken up mostly by a small tin-roofed single-car garage.

The house was furnished sparsely in classic modern furniture, reflecting my taste at the time. Since the furniture was a gift from my parents, it was all made to order—luckily, Phil was blissfully unaware of how much things like that cost, so he didn’t protest. We bought living-room curtains from Woodward and Lothrop.

This little house helped us to accomplish what Phil and I both wanted—to live as our contemporaries did. Because of Phil’s insistence, and my agreement, that we live on our combined salaries, and because mine was so little to begin with, my first inclination was to stop work and be a stay-at-home wife—learn to cook and keep house. Phil was horrified by the idea. He said it would be terrible to be working late and have me anxiously waiting at the door with a lemon pie. Furthermore, he really wanted me to go on working and decided we could pay a maid with what I earned. So the superb Mattie Jeffress entered our lives. A friend of my mother’s laundress, Mattie came each day before breakfast and stayed through dinner, with two half-days off, if I remember correctly. She did the cleaning and personal laundry, as well as the cooking. For this, I blush to admit, we paid her all of $15 a week.

Phil was earning $3,600 a year as a law clerk, which he pointed out was far from a sacrifice, since at that time this was equal to or somewhat
more than the beginning salaries in law firms. I was earning about $1,500 a year. We had one small cushion, a $500 wedding present from an aunt, which I thought I could use for extras like theater and travel tickets. In a sense, Phil was almost as spoiled and unaware of finances as I was, having gone straight from law school into the luxurious arms of life at Hockley.

I began to learn how to live on a different scale. The enormous trousseau I’d bought spared me from worrying about clothes, but it was clear that I hadn’t the remotest idea about the particulars of domestic life. And, given the hardworking Mattie, there was still a great deal I didn’t have to learn. A hamburger or scrambled eggs on her nights off were almost beyond my competence, for instance. There are still odd lacunae, I confess. I have never in my life pressed a dress.

I was driven to a frenzy of small economies, doing ridiculous things to save money—like taking the laundry to Tolman’s, the local cleaner, rather than having it picked up, because it saved ten cents a pound. Of course, Tolman’s also ruined the linen monogrammed sheets my mother had given me for my trousseau, but I had no idea that these were very special, since that’s what I had slept on all my life. When we moved into our house in September 1940, I began keeping a little accounts book, dutifully noting every penny spent, including the cost of gas and oil for the car, stamps, groceries, even our personal allowances, which were $9 each per week. The entries taper off in October, and there are no more after November, so obviously I quickly tired of this kind of accounting, but except for the $500 wedding present I never used a cent of my own until two years later, when Phil went into the army. Even when I got pregnant, I wore borrowed clothes to supplement my inexpensive department-store maternity dresses—and looked very dowdy, I’m sure, out of a driven desire to live up to our agreement. Yet, despite my overdoing it, it was good for me and for us both to live on our salaries. In fact, most of what Phil decreed and I assented to
was
good for us. And we were having a great time.

Our friends continued much the same that year, with the Hockley boys—especially Prich, Bill Sheldon, and John Ferguson—being among our closest. At the same time, several new people entered our lives. Prich started taking out a beautiful half-English girl named Evangeline Bell, who was Attorney General Francis Biddle’s secretary/assistant. I grew even closer to Evangeline later, after she married David Bruce. Joe Rauh, one of the great fighting liberals, and his wife, Olie, became our great friends during this time. We also got to know Joseph Alsop better. He was not that much older than we were but seemed at least a generation ahead in his social life and experience.

Also important to us that year were the Romillys, Esmond and Jessica, or Decca, as she was known; Decca was Jessica Mitford, one of the famously eccentric Mitfords. The very young Decca met Esmond Romilly,
her second cousin and a nephew of Winston Churchill’s, at a dinner party and asked him, if he was going to fight with the International Brigade in Spain, to take her with him. He agreed, and off they went together, fell in love en route, and created a terrible public storm, during which Anthony Eden, then foreign minister, sent a destroyer to retrieve Decca.

In February 1939, Decca and Esmond came to America, and it was sometime that year that I met them, was charmed, and invited them to Mount Kisco for the weekend. They were surprised to find the atmosphere there so congenial and my parents so warm and welcoming, remarking that such open warmth didn’t exist in England.

The Romillys took off on a tour of the United States, heading south to New Orleans, but they took a wrong turn somewhere and wound up in Miami where they got a job in a bar whose owners needed $1,000 for a liquor license. Esmond flew up to Washington to ask my father for a loan. He had a big argument ready, complete with a list of assets in England that could be used as collateral. My father gently said, “You don’t need to explain foreign exchange, Esmond,” and promptly lent him the money, for which Esmond procured a half-interest in the bar.

When the war intensified Esmond volunteered for the Canadian Air Corps and, tragically, died in a bomber not long afterwards. Decca stayed on in Washington for a while, remarried, and later became a famous investigative journalist. She remained my dear friend until her recent death.

Another key figure who entered our lives was Jean Monnet. In late 1940, Monnet arrived in the United States, an unknown but vitally important figure in the world and in the war. He had been in England when France fell, and arrived here not only unknown but with no official title, no formal portfolio, and no platform except his own brain and personality. Monnet had been nominated by Churchill to be part of the British Supply Council in Washington, and his mission from the Free French and the British was to get supplies built up and moving.

Monnet was proof positive that if someone is brilliant, political, and concentrated, he can make a power base where none exists. And he went on doing it all his life, after the war working on his idea for a united Europe. His mode of operation was to know the right people—those who had the knowledge, the power, and the will to move things—then to learn what made things move and to be constantly pushing the levers of power. He was very selective about whom he saw and how he used his time. He never made small talk, and he always kept to the point in his discussions, at meetings, or even at dinners. Phil hero-worshipped him. At one Sunday lunch on our terrace many years later, with just the three of us together, when Phil and I were praising him, Jean shook his head modestly and protested, “I’ve only had one idea, but that was a good one.”

But the overwhelmingly dominant influence in our lives that first year was Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, for whom Phil was now clerking. Felix and his wife, Marion, were friends of the Biddles, the Achesons, the Bob Lovetts, and later the Jack McCloys, the Jean Mon-nets, and the French ambassador, Henri Bonnet, and his wife, and we were lucky enough to get to know them all. Though Phil and Felix had become close when Phil was still in law school, their mutual interests and bright, quick natures now brought them even closer together. Phil’s love of politics met its match in Felix Frankfurter.