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into Long Island Sound for a swim and saw something floating in the water that displeased him. He returned to the Rye house and announced—in his imperious fashion—that his family would thereafter also spend their summers in Southampton. The family took over a large section of the resort’s Irving Hotel while the McDonnell house was going up hard by the Murrays’. The McDonnell house had over fifty rooms, and was promptly dubbed “the hotel.” Next came two more of Thomas E. Murray’s children, his sons Tom, Jr. and John F. Murray, and both acquired large houses in what had become the Murray family compound. Meanwhile, another son, Joseph B. Murray, and a daughter, Julia, who had married Herbert Lester Cuddihy, acquired equally substantial places in nearby Water Mill. Eventually, there were eight houses on perhaps thirty acres of shorefront, plus garages, stables, boathouses, pools, and a polo field.
    The Tom Murray, Jr.’s had eleven children, the Jack Murrays had seven, and the Joe Murrays had five. The Cuddihys had seven, and the McDonnells topped all of Grandpa Murray’s offspring with fourteen. (The Pope himself, or so went a family joke, had given Anna Murray McDonnell his personal permission to have as many children as she wanted and, because it was the fashion in the 1920’s and ’30’s for pregnant women to pass most of their time lying down, Anna McDonnell spent the better part of fifteen years in bed, while her husband had a “nervous breakdown” with the announcement of each new arrival, as though he had nothing to do with it—and with the prospect of having to make another million dollars in his brokerage business for the new child.) Thomas E. Murray’s daughter, Katherine, who married J. Ennis McQuail, also came to Southampton with her more modest quota of two children, and so did another daughter, Marie, who—to confuse things somewhat—had married James Francis McDonnell’s brother John, making their two McDonnell children doublecousins of all the other McDonnell children. When President Theodore Roosevelt publicly decried the increasing number of small families among the “best” American family stocks, warning of the dangers of “race suicide,” Grandpa Murray sent Roosevelt a photograph of his own huge clan, to approve of and to autograph. The President returned the picture with his signature.
    It was no wonder, however, with this onslaught of Murrays, that Southampton was soon—perhaps spitefully—being referred to as “Murray Bay.” In fact, the only one of Grandpa Murray’s eight children who did not join the patriarch in Southampton was brother Daniel Murray, who, after a brief but brilliant career at Georgetown, had fallen from a polo pony, sustained a head injury, and become an incompetent. Whenever Uncle Daniel’s face showed up in an old family photograph, and the children asked who he was, they were told, “He died.” He had, in fact, not died, but had been placed at McLean Institute outside Boston, where Grandpa Murray had provided him with a house of his own on the hospital grounds, servants, and a nurse-companion. His brothers and sisters paid him regular visits, but the children were never told of these.
    It would be pleasant to suppose that all these relations gathered together along these balmy summer miles of beach would have composed One Big Happy Family, but of course this was not the case. There was constant squabbling within and without this vast—and, by now, quite wealthy—family group. Most of the fights were about money, now that there was so much of it, and these usually centered on the fact that Grandpa Murray’s sons, who worked for his companies and other scattered interests, always seemed to have more money than his daughters, who didn’t. Thomas E. Murray, Jr. was the martinet of the next generation, and the strictest Catholic, and he was