wrote a friend of hers in 1927, “and her father’s admiration for her and devotion to her is one of the rarest things to behold…Mrs. Murphy, very patrician with beautiful white hair and many jewels, sits back and smokes her cigarettes without interesting herself very much in her husband’s and her daughter’s very brilliant dialogue.” Patrick Murphy bullied his sons, Frederic and Gerald, but he was Esther’s champion—“so proud,” in his wife’s words, “that he [could] hardly see straight.” Part of the first group of Irish Catholics to find acceptance in New York society, Murphy raised his children in a muddled combination of privileges deriving from his success and scorn for the fact that they could not repeat his trajectory. Esther, whom he called Tess, was exempt from some of the expectations that haunted her brothers, such as success in business, and she exceeded others, with her scholarly acumen. Still, like her brothers, she grew up steeped in an atmosphere of opportunity and exclusion and in the myth and fact of Patrick Murphy’s professional and social climb.
