A Wedding Night To Remember, And Research

A Wedding Night To Remember, And Research

By Mickey Rathbun

My husband, Christopher Benfey, and I were married at Trinity Episcopal Church in Upperville 40 years ago. It was early October; fall colors were beginning to glow in the trees, and the countryside smelled of ripening apples and the final haycutting of the season.

Our wedding reception took place at Welbourne, a few miles from my parents’ farm, where I had grown up, the daughter of long-time Middleburg residents Duffy and Sheilah Rathbun. A chance encounter on that momentous day inspired my quest to solve the mystery of George Gordon Moore, my maternal grandfather.

Welbourne has been in the same family for eight generations. Built of brick and stucco, it is a soft yellow, with tall white columns, the house has an aura of well-worn majesty. Legendary fighters for the slaveholding Confederacy, including Jeb Stuart and John Mosby, are said to have stayed at Welbourne during the Civil War, and many illustrious guests have visited since.

Chris and I had spent our two-year courtship mostly in Boston, where he was in graduate school, and New York, where I had recently embarked on a legal career.

For us, the rural southern wedding was a lark, a pleasant detour into a genteel world where time seemed to move more slowly, if it moved at all. Guests nibbled country-ham biscuits and drank champagne and Kentucky bourbon out on the veranda. Late roses and pale hydrangeas, rouged like old ladies’ cheeks, still bloomed in the gardens; as darkness fell, I glimpsed a few couples wandering in the overgrown boxwood maze behind the house.

Among the guests were my mother’s cousin Honoria Donnelly and her husband, Bill, two of my parents’ oldest and dearest friends. Honoria was the daughter of Gerald and Sara Murphy, the celebrated expatriate couple at the center of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age coterie.

The Donnellys had booked a room at the same rustic inn where Chris and I were spending our wedding night. When we arrived there after the reception, we ran into them at the front desk. Although it was nearly midnight, Bill and Honoria insisted on toasting our future with a nightcap. He ordered a bottle of champagne, and we sat in the empty bar trading family stories.

With her pearly skin and halo of silvery blonde hair, Honoria seemed as effervescent as the champagne we sipped. She told us how much she had enjoyed the wedding. “Did you know that Scott Fitzgerald stayed at Welbourne?” she asked.

Chris had just gotten his Ph.D. in American literature and was intrigued to hear that Fitzgerald had stayed in the very house where we had cut our wedding cake. I mentioned that my grandfather had also stayed at Welbourne during his annual Christmas visits many years earlier. “George Gordon Moore,” she murmured. “He was a colorful character.”

While I knew only sketchy details of my grandfather’s life, I had heard it mentioned that he had been F. Scott Fitzgerald’s model for Jay Gatsby. As a teenager I had loved The Great Gatsby although I could not fully grasp its moral ambiguity.

The story about Gatsby and my grandfather had lodged in my brain. But as far as I could tell, neither my mother nor anyone else in the family took it seriously. That evening, as we sat with Honoria and Bill talking about weddings and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Gatsby story floated into my mind. I wondered whether, having grown up with the Fitzgeralds, Honoria might know something about the speculation regarding my grandfather and Gatsby.

In that champagne-addled moment, I mentioned the story about Fitzgerald and my grandfather and asked her if she thought it might be true. She raised her eyebrows and smiled her ethereal smile.

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all,” she said.

She may have been trying to humor me, or perhaps she’d had one too many glasses of champagne. But I went to sleep on my wedding night in Middleburg puzzling over the possibility that my grandfather might have been the inspiration for Jay Gatsby, one of the most famous characters in American literature.

Mickey Rathbun’s book, The Real Gatsby: George Gordon Moore, A Granddaughter’s Memoir has been published by White River Press.