The Cramoisy Queen: A Life of Caresse Crosby

2. Polly Meets Harry

13 2 PollyMeetsHarry T o all concerned, Polly appeared to be a solid member of Boston society. Her years at Miss Chapin’s and Rosemary Hall were put to good use on Beacon Hill. Even though her modish short haircut and pink nail polish gave away her allegiance to New York City fashion, her etiquette withstood the closest New England scrutiny. She was given the respect and sympathy owed to a proper Boston matron when Dick was sent off to hospital; it was understood that the problems of the Peabodys should not be discussed beyond the walls of this exclusive neighborhood. So accepted was Polly by her community that Mrs. Henrietta Grew Crosby—the matriarch of one of Boston’s most patrician families—invited Polly to chaperone a Fourth of July celebration for her son Harry and his friends.A student at Harvard College,Harry had turned twenty-one recently (June , ). After he was graduated in June  from St. Mark’s School in Southborough (where he had distinguished himself by winning the Punctuality Prize),1 he volunteered for the American Field Service Ambulance Corps in France. In September, after the United States declared war on Germany , he enlisted as a private. He was sent back to the ambulance corps, but he was no longer a member of “The House of Lords,”as less well-heeled volunteers of the st section referred to Harry and his prep school friends. Harry was an energetic patriot who believed no self-respecting healthy young man could stay at home once the United States formally entered the war. A good, popular boy, he wrote to his parents faithfully, read his Bible Polly Meets Harry 14 daily, and maintained his chastity. He wondered if any of his girlfriends would be waiting for him when he returned. However, once he experienced the true savagery of war at Verdun, like so many others, he threw away old definitions of heroism. As a volunteer, he was given the gruesome assignment of carrying barrels full of amputated arms and legs from the front. After he enlisted, his unit had reputedly evacuated more than two hundred wounded from the battlefield in a day. The most devastating experience for Harry was a brush with death. His ambulance was decimated by a shell that exploded close to the field dressing station: he survived; his friend Spud Spaulding spent six months in the hospital recovering from the shrapnel that had torn open his chest. Harry accompanied Spaulding to the hospital room in nearby Beaulieu. When he got back to camp, “he was seen running, more or less in circles, fifty yards in diameter,lap upon lap,without purpose or destination.”2 Confronted by the reality of war’s consequences, Harry no longer believed in the ideals he had been once taught to treasure, and the comfortable harness of decorum was broken. He took pride in receiving the Croix de Guerre shortly before the war ended—ironically, he had thought at one point that it was worth being wounded to get one. However, by the time he returned to Boston in April , he was alienated, dissipated, and possibly shell-shocked. Under pressure from his family, Harry had enrolled at Harvard that very same spring as a “war degree” candidate, which would enable him to be graduated in June . The majority of his coursework was in French and English literature, but he kept away from literary-minded students and such college-sponsored publications as the Advocate and the Lampoon. A chief interest of Stephen Crosby in sending his son to Harvard was to continue the tradition of Crosby membership in the A.D., one of Harvard’s two original “final” clubs for seniors. (The other was the Porcellian.) The exclusive private organization took its name from the first two words of Alpha Delta Phi, the fraternity chapter at Harvard that gave up its charter in  after its members failed to concur on the course of the Civil War. It took three nominations to get Harry elected,because unlike his fellow classmates, who drank and partied as long as no one was watching, Harry carried out his antics and excesses without a shred of self-consciousness. He had learned to drink during the war and saw no reason to curb the habit at home. Many of his friends began to regard him as a “public nuisance.” As Geoffrey Wolff reports, they noted “with no little revulsion that he had painted his fingernails black. Harry’s clothes were...