Free Real Lace by Stephen; Birmingham Page A

favorite sermons—the one on the evil of birth control or the other on the importance of sending children to Catholic schools.
    Socially, there were a few snubs from the Protestant summer residents of Southampton, and there was talk of “this Irish invasion.” “Oh, so you’re a Catholic,” said a Southampton lady to Mrs. Murray. “That’s what my cook does on Sundays. She’s taught me quite a lot about the Catholics.” “I suppose you’d also ask yourcook,” said Mrs. Murray crisply, “which corner of a visiting card to turn down.” From a dressing room at Foulke & Foulke’s dress shop in Southampton, one of the McDonnells overheard a customer saying to Mrs. Foulke, “Isn’t it dreadful—all these Irish we’re getting here?” “At least they pay their bills,” replied Mrs. Foulke. This was true. Anna Murray McDonnell, who never liked to be remiss about anything, would never leave her desk in the morning until every single bill was paid. And there was a certain amount of commotion within the membership of the Southampton Beach Club when Grandpa Murray and his voluminous offspring wanted to join. A sign, borrowing the phrasing of the famous Boston snub, “No Irish Need Apply,” was briefly hung on the club’s front door. But the Beach Club also wanted to build a salt-water pool, and faced the same sand-filtering problem that Grandpa Murray had. At last the club agreed to let the family join, provided Grandpa Murray would share the secret of his invention with them. In Southampton it was soon being said, “If you’re an Irish Catholic here, you’ve got to be rich.”
    â€œWe overcame by sheer numbers,” recalls Mary Jane Cuddihy MacGuire. “After all, we were about sixty strong. We were our own defense, and nobody could touch us. If someone wanted a partner for tennis or golf, they practically had to ask one of us. And those were wonderful, glorious days. We literally didn’t have a care in the world. We danced, we swam, we went to parties. Meyer Davis always played. There was very little drinking. Maybe we had some innate fear of inheriting the ‘Irish curse,’ I don’t know, but we always frowned on anyone who drank, and anybody who got drunk was ostracized. There were always friends dropping in, and house guests, and if we ran out of beds people slept on the piano or on the billiard table. It was marvelous fun. We cared nothing at all about money. We were never taught anything about money. We just spent it. When I was sixteen, I was given an allowance of three hundred dollars a month. I promptly went outand ran up fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of bills on clothes. Daddy took my allowance away for a while, but then he gave it back. I can’t tell you how many five-hundred-dollar chiffon dresses I’ve ruined jumping into pools at parties. I remember when my husband asked me to marry him, he told me he was making only twenty-five dollars a week. I said to him, ‘But that’s plenty of money to live on—isn’t it?’” And so, in this gay and carefree manner, the new-rich American Irish families made their way into what passed for New York society or, more properly, Café Society. When Mary Jane Cuddihy, in the late 1930’s, danced without her shoes at the old E1 Morocco, her picture was published around the world, even in Nazi Germany, where the photograph was offered as testimony of “the extreme state of poverty in the U.S.”
    Grandpa Murray did not have long to live in his great Southampton house. He had developed a fondness for yellow taffy almost to the point of addiction. A box of yellow taffy was almost always within his reach, and he passed out taffy to his children and grandchildren. At Southampton, he became ill with diabetes, and he died in his house there on July 21, 1929. He was not quite sixty-nine. At the time of his death,