What emerged from the naval architect’s drafting board was a rough-hewn structure built of gray granite, its walls anchored deep into the soil. Like the Big Ship, almost no wood was used in its construction. A verse from the gospel of Matthew was chiseled into the stone mantelpiece: “Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him to a wise man, which built his house upon a rock; And the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house, and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.”17
The house proved to be just that, described as “snug and comfortable even in the worst weather.”18
Gibbs also purchased a large motor yacht. True to form, Weather was square, plain, and sturdy.
Vera encouraged his enthusiasm for the new house. Far from the social obligations of New York and Locust Valley, the busiest sounds were the cries of the gulls and the pounding of surf.
But the diversion did not last. Within a few years, Vera found herself alone at Rockport during the summer, with Gibbs making only occasional visits.19 She occupied herself by reading and going for long, frigid swims around the point.
Her husband also avoided her pre-opera parties in New York. “Will doesn’t care much for the opera,” she told an acquaintance of her son Adrian.
When at the opera, she had strong opinions, even as her hearing deteriorated and she had to wear a hearing aid. “I can’t stand that soprano!” she once shouted loud enough for the entire house to hear. During intermission, she told one guest she was off to her private locker for a swig of whiskey.20
In New York, the couple saw each other at breakfast or in the late evening. William Francis did not leave his office for lunch, but ate at his desk. When he dined out, he always ordered the same thing: pork chops, canned peaches, and a mix of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. He would wash it down with his only alcoholic indulgence: half a whiskey old-fashioned. He cared little about food, in the words of his friend Frank Braynard, but rather “the quality of the service and the atmosphere of the dining room.”21
He did not keep late nights during the week, however, usually coming home and getting to bed around 9:30 P.M. At this point in their lives, the couple kept separate bedrooms. Vera’s was stuffed to the gunwales with books. Her husband’s was full of mementos: a silver tennis trophy that he won with his brother, Frederic; his earliest ship drawings; a framed Lincoln quotation: “The darkness of the quiet past is inadequate to the stormy present.” There was also a photograph of 1733 Walnut Street, his childhood home, taken when it was one of Philadelphia’s grandest mansions.22
“Before he’s asleep, I come in and there he is lying in bed looking at the pictures he carries,” Vera said. “It’s always either his model fire engine or the United States.”23 He also stubbornly held on to another machine. In the garage of their Long Island estate he kept a 1903 Mercedes—the same car that he and Frederic had raced in their youth, when it was the ultimate symbol of modernity, speed, and status.
Gibbs also felt his reclusive brother Frederic needed to have some fun, and encouraged him in buying an updated version of their childhood car: a red Ferrari.
“The expensive sound of a Ferrari getting away,” Gibbs said. “A dreadful racket.”24
Gibbs did not lavish the same care on his children that he did on his machines. Neither of his sons ever showed any interest in becoming naval architects.
After serving as an Army lieutenant during World War II, his stepson, Adrian Larkin, took a job at the International Institute of Education in New York and also kept a house in Pride’s Crossing, Massachusetts, a fashionable town not far from Rockport. He probably wanted to be near his mother.
The elder, Francis (known as Frank), moved to Colorado, where he honed his skills as a singer, drummer, and radio announcer. He eventually came back to Rockport, Massachusetts, and then moved to Maine.
Perhaps resenting the attention his father lavished on the Big Ship, Frank kept his father’s achievements hidden from his daughter Susan, born in 1962. “I had no idea he had even achieved fame.” Susan Gibbs said of the grandfather she had met only a few times as a young child.25 For Susan, both her paternal grandparents were remote and formal figures, relics of a fast-waning, old-order East Coast establishment.
According to his wife, Paula, Frank Gibbs would proudly point out that the tourist guidebook to Rockport, Massachusetts, had an entry on the antics of his mother’s rambunctious dog Luther, but said nothing about his father, William Francis Gibbs, who she knew was a “designer of ships like the SS United States, the fastest passenger liner ever built in the history of the world.”26
Gibbs’s other son, Christopher, also fled the social world of his parents, taking a job as a schoolteacher in Apple Valley, California. His father once tried to reach out to him by sending a framed copy of the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling. “I have found it to be not too complex to understand, but very specific in his message, as well as in its many implications,” Christopher wrote his mother about the gift. One stanza must have conveyed to him what William Francis Gibbs expected of his son, and perhaps of himself:
Christopher hung the poem above his fireplace, “where it is always in view, as a reminder.”
In 1966, Christopher went back to New York to visit his father, for what turned out to be the last time. “I have read and heard him described in terms of ‘greatness,’” he wrote to his mother of the encounter, “and I think that when I had the chance to visit with him last summer, I came away with a feeling of what this ‘greatness’ referred to. A newly-found feeling, I may add.”27
It seems that William Francis and Vera Gibbs, as trailblazing as they were in their professional and social lives, were coldly Victorian as parents raising children. The children, in turn, kept a distance from their father, his world, and his greatest achievement; nor did they become any part of their mother’s in New York.
With his children grown and his wife busy, William Francis Gibbs found he needed something more than just work. As he grew older, the ascetic engineer devoted more of his time to St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. The parishioners of the Gothic church were high-church in their leanings, and William Francis grumbled that a “humble man” like himself had a hard time understanding all the rituals. No matter, sustaining the life of the church became his main diversion, and he enjoyed donning his formal outfit of striped trousers, cutaway morning coat, and homburg hat each Sunday.28 As a vestryman at St. Thomas, he insisted that expensive paid pews be abolished, and he also removed the church’s wooden doors, replacing them with ones made of glass that allowed pedestrians to look inside.29