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up from New York the day after our brother died. I introduced him to one of the masters at Groton since he would soon be coming to the school, and I told the master: “We’re filling up the ranks.”
    My mother went into a decline right off. It was she who persuaded Babbo to write his book about Halla, just as her mother had written the little volume about Francis Minturn. Now she expressed her grief in a letter to her mother:
     
Darling, darling, Mamma—All that last night, I thought of you so often, and after the end, all the first day, I kept saying, “Poor, poor Mamma, I don’t wonder she nearly went crazy.” Every year, I felt more and more I understood but it is not until our own hearts are pierced that we can begin to know the suffering.
     
    Within a year the blood vessels broke in my mother’s eyes and it seemed as if she’d become totally blind, but something arrested it. I remember she was very touching. She said, “You’re practically grown up, so I don’t worry. All I wanted was to see how Francis looks when he grows up.”
    Francis was a terribly ambitious fellow, but he was very delicate when he was at Groton. He complained of severe pains. The doctors tried to tell him it was his imagination. His football coach took me aside once and said, “I hate to ask this, but is Francis sandless?” What do you call that now?—no guts, afraid of contact. Finally, a great doctor diagnosed that he had osteomyelitis. Do you know what that is? it’s a dangerous infection of the bone; it could have led within a few weeks to death or come to a head and had to be operated on. With Francis it just sort of whistled around his body. He had to use crutches at times. But there were other problems. He was high-strung, too. He told me: “I have these faraway feelings that are not part of me.” He was full of phobias. He was afraid of darkness—he saw things in the dark. He was so scared of water that he didn’t learn to swim until he was fourteen. He was afraid of horses for a long time, and dark woods.

    Babbo at Harvard, 1879
     
    SAUCIE SEDGWICK  It didn’t help that at the time my grandmother May had a series of strokes. Each time, my father was taken out of Groton and hurried down to be with her. But she didn’t die. He would return to school in a state of terrible anguish.
    MINTURN SEDGWICK  Our mother didn’t recognize us any more. Her mind was gone. She had aged terribly, her nose was red from a drug she had to take, and I remember Babbo telling Francis and me, “How I wish you had known your mother when she was young and beautiful.”
    When she finally died, all the color was drained out of her face and I remember being startled that she looked young again and extraordinarily handsome lying there. That first night I offered to sleep in the same room as Francis, but he said it wasn’t necessary.
    My mother’s body was cremated and there was a big, fancy funeral at Calvary Church in New York. Afterwards we all went up to Stock-bridge. Babbo walked down the village street to the Sedgwick Pie carrying my mother’s ashes in a green student’s bag. He chose two quotations for her tombstone: “Some lives bend over other lives as the heavens bend over the earth.” The other was from Dante:
“Beatrice in suso, ed io in lei, guardava,”
which translates: “Beatrice was gazing upward, and I on her.”
    SAUCIE SEDGWICK  My grandmother’s death was an unbelievable strain on my father. He finally had a nervous breakdown and it was recommended that he leave Groton. Babbo sent him out to Santa Barbara to the Cate School, which was run by a remarkable pair, Curtis Cate and his wife, Katherine Thayer. Bostonians often sent their children to the Cate School. Katherine Cate was what you would call a character. My father used to tell a story about her when she was a younger woman living in Boston. She had gone to a dinner party, and when the ladies were alone having their coffee, she grew bored. She was wearing