Deference to males, no matter their age, was an article of faith in the Phipps household, and by the time she was twelve, Eleanor, with no show of temper, would lose regularly at tennis to boys who weren’t nearly as good as she was. With similar equanimity, she would never argue with a boy or, worse, correct him, no matter how thick he was. At most she’d allow herself a “Do you think so?” then clear her throat. Mrs. Phipps took the hard line against female intelligence, thinking it suspect in a woman, unpardonable in a girl. Vulgarity was the besetting sin, the mark of the ill-bred, covering a range of behaviors extending well beyond conspicuous consumption to reading French novels, confusing a fish fork with a dessert fork, nodding off at the opera, using “lay” instead of “lie,” and wearing white shoes after Labor Day.
Adolescence offered no escape for Eleanor from the maternal dragnet except in furtive play. Pre-Kinsey, she didn’t have a name for it; she only knew she wasn’t to do it. “No decent person does it,” Mrs. Phipps told her. “Only perverts.” Eleanor’s response, by now second nature, was to slip into silence, which passed for submission, and take long baths.
Her mother always blamed Vassar for Eleanor’s marriage to Rupert, and certainly it contributed to her general “Bolshiness,” as her mother called it. In truth, the path was laid down when she was sixteen in a setting Mrs. Phipps would have thought, if not entirely wholesome, then safe enough.
Eleanor was spending the night at the home of a Brearley classmate, Clarissa Van Vliet. Clarissa’s parents, despite impeccable antecedents, were by Mrs. Phipps’s lights “Bohemian.” They lived on the Upper West Side, not the Upper East. Their living room bookshelves held books and not antique Chinese export pottery. Their three children, ages eleven to sixteen, regularly ate dinner with their parents. They socialized with Jews and homosexuals.
That evening at dinner, Mrs. Van Vliet directed her conversation toward Clarissa and her guest, telling them about “a terrific book” she was rereading, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. “It’s as good as I remember—I first read it when I was at Vassar, English 225, I think,” she said. “The professor was advanced.” Her husband looked up from his plate, amused. “Very advanced, even for Vassar. Isn’t it what we called in my day a ‘dirty’ book?” he asked. “Well, of course it is,” Mrs. Van Vliet said. “How are young women supposed to learn anything?” As she said this, she knocked her water glass to the floor, where it shattered into scores of tiny, spiky shards. “Oh, shit,” Mrs. Van Vliet said. The hair on the back of Eleanor’s neck stood up. She’d found the whole conversation exhilarating, but this last outburst was thrilling. She’d never heard anyone’s mother use a swearword, and she had believed that if one ever slipped out, a thing almost unimaginable, the woman would be filled with chagrin, falling over herself to apologize. Not this mother. Mrs. Van Vliet laughed and called to the maid to sweep it up. The next day, Eleanor went to Scribner’s and bought Women in Love. She stayed up all night reading it. When she’d finished, she told her mother she was going to go to Vassar. Years later, Eleanor would think of that dinner at the Van Vliets’ as her Emma-Bovary-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment.
Eleanor’s first act of open rebellion was to vote for John F. Kennedy in 1960. No one in the family, not since McKinley, had voted for a Democrat. Her second was to marry Rupert Falkes, a penniless Englishman.
—
Rupert Falkes had only one social rule, which he observed punctiliously: a gentleman is never unintentionally rude. He was equal parts charm and rudeness, and in his prime, he was rude at some point or other to almost every person he knew, and many he didn’t. Occasionally, he larded his insults with obscenities. The exceptions were Eleanor, the boys, and her father. He knew that Eleanor wouldn’t tolerate rudeness to herself or the boys. She had made it clear early in their marriage when he criticized their firstborn’s table manners. “He’s not fit to eat at table,” he said to Eleanor. The child, Harry, was sixteen months at the time. He had scant control of the spoon, but insisted on using it, carrying his porridge to his nose as often as to his mouth. When Eleanor tried to help, he pushed her hand away and shook his head. “Self,” he said.
“Right,” Eleanor said. “Off to boarding school with him then.” Rupert took the warning. “I’m not used to eating with babies,” he said. His explanation passed for an apology.
Eleanor never minded his rudeness to others, shrugging it off. “It’s like Tourette’s or hiccups with him,” she would say if a friend mentioned it. “Raise it with him, if you like. He might respond well.”
Rupert had had the good fortune he’d always say of being an orphan. A foundling, he’d been left in the English winter of 1934, when he was no more than a month old, on the steps of St. Pancras in Chichester. He was fair and rosy, healthy, and nicely swaddled, and the priest who’d found him, the Rev. Henry Falkes, was sure his mother would have a change of heart and come fetch him. She didn’t. Rupert grew up in St. Pancras’s Home for Orphaned Boys, a childhood no more brutal than one offered in the Depression years at a Church of England prep school. Whatever the weather, the boys wore shorts. Whatever the games and season, they bathed once a week in communal tubs. Until he came to America, he didn’t know that chilblains were frostbite.
Rupert had a lovely boy’s soprano voice that made him stand out from the unruly, runny-nosed, scabrous little boys he lived with. It would prove not only the saving of him but the making of him. When he was seven, Reverend Falkes made an application for him to the Prebendal School and he was accepted as a chorister. From there, he went to public school at Longleat on a scholarship, and then to Cambridge, as a scholar. Holidays, he spent with Reverend Falkes, who was proud of Rupert and always kind to him but unaffectionate in that wooden way of Englishmen sent off to boarding school before they cut their second teeth.
Rupert emigrated to America in the summer of 1955, when he was twenty-one. Reverend Falkes had died without warning on Boxing Day the year before and there was nothing to keep him in England. Twice abandoned and orphaned, he had no home, no one looking out for him, no useful connections. Despite his first-class education, his prospects, if he stayed, would be limited. And he was made for America. Americans loved his accent and his Cambridge pedigree and regarded his orphaned status almost as an asset, the stamp of authenticity of the self-made man. The first time Eleanor saw him weep was when he read The Great Gatsby. “We don’t read this in England,” he said. “Witless arrogance.”
Rupert never talked about his first year in America, and Eleanor was never sure how he’d got on. The story he would tell was that he met the dean of Yale Law School, Eugene Debs Rostow, on a train that first year, and talked his way into a scholarship there. Rostow would not regret the decision. Rupert made the Law Journal, clerked for Judge Friendly on the Second Circuit, and then went to work for Maynard, Tandy & Jordan, where he practiced antitrust law in the golden age of antitrust. He made a lot of money, and when he retired at sixty-five, he endowed three chairs at Yale, one in honor of Dean Rostow.