Free Real Lace by Stephen; Birmingham

family rhyme:
    Tommy-Tommy Tittlemouse
    Stole the eggs from Murray’s house,
    Hid them in McDonnell’s cellar.
    Now wasn’t he the naughty feller?
    The fact that Auntie Katherine McQuail seemed to play a great deal of golf with Monsignor George H. Killeen, the ruddy-faced, heavily jowled pastor of a Southampton Catholic church, was the cause for frequent comment among others in the family. “I’m absolutely sure that golf is all that’s going on between them,” her relatives said, “even though Father Killeen does look a bit like Spencer Tracy.”
    In the McDonnell household, Tom, the family chauffeur, was a troublemaker. Once he reported to his mistress that he had seen Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury drive by, and said, “Mrs. Stotesbury has a chauffeur in maroon livery, and a second man ‘on the box’”—i.e., seated beside the driver. Thereafter Tom, too, was accompanied by a footman riding “on the box.” But Tom clearly disliked chauffeuring and, at his urging, little Jim McDonnell one day chased his nurse around the house with an air rifle. The nurse, understandably, gave prompt notice following this episode, and Tom took over her job. The children adored him. The senior McDonnells liked to retire early, but the children would sit up until the wee hours with Tom, in the maids’ dining room, reading tea leaves and going over the racing form, picking out winners on the next day’s races—for which Tom placed their bets. There was a huge uproar, and a general revamping of the McDonnell household, when it was discovered that the servants, who had gone out weekly with huge shopping lists, had been receiving kickbacks from various Southampton stores.
    Still, every effort was made to keep up dignity and decorum, and to maintain a standard of what had come to be known as gracious living. “Always go First Class,” James McDonnell used to counsel his children. “Always be the best at everything you do, and never accept anything that’s second-rate.” Everybody dressed for dinner, and little boys were never permitted at the dinner table without a clean shirt, jacket, and tie. Self-improvement was stressed, and a map of the world always hung on the McDonnelldining room wall, to help the children learn geography. When it was time to move back into the city, and go back to school—the girls to the Sacred Heart, the boys to Georgetown prep—Anna Murray McDonnell, in her continuous state of accouchement , always required her children to line up at her bedside each morning for clothing inspection. The little girls always carried rosary beads in their purses, and the boys carried them in their jacket pockets. They were fitted for coats by a man who came to the house from Rowe of London, and the little girls’ dresses were hand-made creations by an outfit called Fairyland in Paris, or from a fashionable New York dressmaker named Marcelle Julienne. De Pinna, then a stylish New York clothing store, also received a great deal of Murray-McDonnell-Cuddihy custom for ready-to-wear.
    â€œThere was something almost mesmerizing about Southampton in those early days,” recalls one woman who married into the Murray clan. “I had never seen anything like it—the clothes, and the jewels the women wore. I’d feel naked if I went out without dozens of bracelets, and they wore diamond earrings to play golf. Of course it was all very nouveau riche , nothing at all like the way the older money lived on the North Shore, or at the Piping Rock Club.” There was also something “almost feudal” about Southampton on a Sunday, when the fleet of Murray and McDonnell cars lined up to transport the families to morning Mass. The front pews on the left-hand side of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Church were always reserved for the Murrays, McDonnells, and Cuddihys, who assembled solemnly to listen to one of Father Killeen’s two