“Well, Father, I’d say it’s—it’s a little bit like an old goat.”
Before he had left Hollywood, it had been arranged that a party of us would meet at the next spring’s Mardi Gras and I’d bought him a suit to replace the one he was wearing, which was turning green with age. He wrote me about both items soon after he got home:
Brace yourself. This is probably your first “mash” note from a dignified, almost funereal representative of the cloth, on which you made a positively ripping impression. (Me for the ecclesiastical tailors!) Your casual conversational reference, for instance, to someone as an equine posterior (remember? even though those two words are not exactly the ones you used) left me limp with inner mirth.
Girl, I’m envious for the first time in my life. With your gift of gusto, what a ministry I’d have had! I’d have blown Negro prejudice in N’Orleans to smithereens and been an electrified Abe Lincoln to the lowly. Henceforth mouse Murphy shall assume stature and verve. In sheer defiance of incipient arthritis, he shall frisk.
Don’t forget our date for Mardi Gras. It is said on the Delta that all good Americans go to N’Orleans when they die, and that all wise ones come while they are living. You are very wise, ma chère....
He signed off “Mississipiously, Edward F. Murphy, SSJ.” Letters over the years carried fifty-nine varieties of sign-off greetings: “Emphaticallergically” ... “Con amore-and-more” ... “Your sancrosanctly devoted friend” ... “Deltavowedly” ... “Turkishbathetically.”
His first letter deserved a prompt reply:
Now you can brace yourself after that beginning. You’ve won me, hands down. Don’t confuse that with the Church, however, as I’m still a Quaker. You go ahead and make your contacts for our voodoo meeting down there, even if you have to hold it in the church, because Frances Marion and I are-a-comin’ ... God bless the Irish!
He promised to “put the curse of the seven wet-nosed orphans on the weatherman if he doesn’t behave himself while you’re here.” Somebody must have had influence, because the February weather was fabulous, and Mardi Gras turned out to be a long, nonstop ball. I didn’t miss anything. We lunched with Mayor “Chep” Morrison, teaed with Frances Parkinson Keyes, nibbled chicken legs alfresco with total strangers squatting on the asphalt in the middle of Canal Street.
We had a magnificent four-hour luncheon at Brennan’s restaurant where every dish had been prepared in wine, champagne, or brandy sauces. Father Murphy religiously abstained from anything that came by the bottle but ate heartily and conscientiously spooned up every last drop of the sauces. “I’m not drinking,” he observed blandly, “but there’s no rule against my not eating these things.”