Margaret Wise Brown Page 20

  Dozens of friends visited the Only House over the years. Most came by the Rockland ferry. From the boat landing to the house itself was a brief walk along a path in the woods. A white rabbit—a cast-iron Victorian doorstop—stood watch by the Only House’s entrance, which opened onto a narrow pantry-lined stairway leading upward to the main rooms.

  The house was a small pearl-gray clapboard affair with white trim, perched on high ground so as to afford its original occupant, the quarrymaster of the Bodwell Granite Company, an unobstructed view of the loading dock that was now Margaret’s private pier.

  There were three compact floors in all: the ground level, over the crawlspace, with a workshop and comfortably furnished guest room; the middle floor, where Margaret had her bedroom, a living room—study and kitchen; and under the eaves, the attic, which served as another guest room.

  Homey and extravagant touches were mixed unpredictably throughout the house: an orange satin fin de siècle divan in one corner, an old-fashioned crank victrola in another. The narrow, low, wood interiors suggested a ship’s quarters—or a “coffin,” as Leonard Weisgard thought.35 (He spent weeks at a time there, sometimes by himself.) The Only House was not wired for telephone service or electricity, and when a fog moved in, completely enveloping the house, one might feel quite convincingly in a world of one’s own.

  Few details at the Only House had been left completely to chance or the elements. Rainwater for bathing was collected in a large tin basin on the roof. The well doubled as a refrigerator, with various ropes leading down into it tagged “Butter,” “Milk,” and so on. One pulled the rope for the thing one wanted and, with luck, up it came.

  Bottles of wine could sometimes also be pulled from this remarkable well, and Margaret liked to surprise visitors on picnic hikes through the woods by absently reaching down into the running stream beside them to fish up a properly chilled bottle just as thoughts were turning to lunch. When wine was wanted at the Only House, she might also send a guest outdoors with certain instructions: “Go past the big black rock. Turn left and walk about eight paces. Look down and you’ll see a stone that looks like it might be loose. It is. Lift it up . . .”36

  There were three outhouses on Margaret’s property, each positioned for the sake of the view. As the Only House had no indoor plumbing, a mirror had been nailed to one of the apple trees in the yard, and a pitcher and basin were left out on a battered Victorian washstand. First-time visitors would be surprised on opening the drawers to find the freshly laid supply of scented soaps and toiletries of Margaret’s “Boudoir.”

  Margaret kept her typewriter in the living room by a window looking out on the sea, with a view of the small outcropping of granite and spruce that she would write about as “The Little Island.” Beside the window was a door that opened onto a sheer fifty-foot drop (a gale having long ago blown away the original wooden stairway) to the rocky shore below. There was a Hitchcockian hint of menace about the door that opened onto nowhere, which Margaret called “the Witch’s Wink” and above which she had posted a sign reading “Mind the View.” From inside, the door framed a breathtaking scene with yachts, herring boat fleets, and seal herds all passing in a kaleidoscopic procession.

  On a section of wall directly opposite the Witch’s Wink Margaret had hung a collection of small mirrors, each differently framed and made flush with its neighbors, so that when the door was open each mirror reflected a different image of the sea to produce endlessly shifting effects of multiple perspective and light. To step before the wall was to glimpse oneself as fragmentary, ever-changing, harlequinesque—“plural,” in Margaret’s own word.37 It was as characteristic a work of Margaret’s protean imagination as was the Only House itself.

  In Maine Margaret pursued a life of pure sensation. Mornings, she plunged in the buff into the icy waters off her granite pier, an exercise for which few guests shared her enthusiasm. On some such occasions local fishermen would wander by in their boats, calling out, “Maaagrit, can you use some lobsters today?”—hoping, of course, to catch a glimpse of their tantalizing neighbor.38

  Margaret picked rosemary to hang over her windows and sweet fern to use for scenting the Only House’s mattresses, and she enjoyed showing off her knowledge of local woodlore for friends. There were troublesome spots in that knowledge, however. A root tea she prepared one day for Dorothy Warren, her first caretaker’s wife, had a horribly acrid taste. Another time, during a walk in the woods, Margaret mistook poisonous dogberries for blueberries. Dorothy Warren’s castor oil and care may have saved her life.

  Although Margaret found the island’s calmer pace of life deeply restorative, quite a few of her New York friends became restless sitting for hours in silence on the Only House’s porch with her lobsterman neighbors, waiting for the few words the local men might utter concerning the condition of their boats or the weather. Margaret took mischievous delight in observing her guests’ attempts at coping with Maine living. If there was childishness in this, there was also comic theater. Few visitors looked back at their misadventures on Vinalhaven without a grin. Charles Shaw, who was glad to leave the Only House after a few days, was perhaps typical in his reaction: “M.W.B.’s house and land has really [sic] beauty and true nature unadulterated. I fear for me, I miss plumbing and hot water. Also the early morning noises [the groaners, screeching gulls and the like] are, alas! too much for me.”39 Other clamorous sounds disturbed the Arcadian calm as well. During the war years, the Navy took gunnery practice in the waters off Vinalhaven and Margaret’s island refuge periodically resounded with the rumble of cannonfire.

  From her college days onward, Margaret had never been without the wise counsel and comforting assurances of some older woman mentor. With hindsight, it seems plain that these significant friendships formed a progression, that each corresponded to a new phase in Margaret’s bravely exploratory, ever-widening efforts to make contact with the most basic parts of her being. It had become Margaret’s pattern to learn all she could from each woman in turn (it was certainly no coincidence that all three were old enough to be her mother) and move on.

  From Marguerite Hearsey, Margaret had acquired the fundamentals of intellectual self-confidence and received her first real encouragement as a writer. There was, however, a certain aloofness about Miss Hearsey, a ladylike diffidence that gradually rendered her a model or mentor of distinct limitations. The gentle teasing that Margaret engaged in with her was symptomatic of the lack she sensed. How was it possible, as Margaret had obliquely suggested in class, to fully appreciate Chaucer (or for that matter literature generally, or life itself) if one was embarrassed by the poet’s lusty humor, his earthy embrace of sensuality?

  In Lucy Mitchell she had found a teacher who had squarely faced the severe restrictions that Victorian morality imposed on artistic and emotional expression, particularly in women, and who had dedicated her life to helping to free new generations of children, teachers, and writers from all such debilitating restraints. Mitchell provided Margaret with the inspiring example of an accomplished woman who had tried quite literally to reinvent herself, to integrate a highly developed intellectual capacity with a long-suppressed life of the senses.

  Margaret learned from her the importance of discipline in creative endeavor, a love of craft, and a certain faith in direct observation as a richly useful tool of understanding. It was also Lucy Mitchell, of course, who had introduced Margaret to her vocation as a writer for the very young.

  But once set on her path as a writer, Margaret had matured so rapidly that she was soon keenly aware of serious limitations inherent in here-and-now-style writing, strictures that reflected Mitchell’s own limitations both as a writer and as a self-made woman. Self-consciousness marred Lucy Mitchell’s forays into the sensory realm, thwarting the realization of her goal of a childlike spontaneity in perception. Mitchell was, when it came down to it, temperamentally unsuited to the task she had set for herself. She remained ever fearful of the unconscious as a wellspring of creat
ivity. No wonder she had made a better mapmaker than poet.

  Margaret met Michael Strange at a time when Mitchell’s influence over her was in decline, when the prospects for a literary correspondence with Gertrude Stein had come to seem very remote indeed, and when her personal life, both with regard to her parents and men, was in a shambles. Michael’s brio and sophistication, her self-proclaimed allegiance to the emotionally liberating poetics of Whitman and contemporary writers like the late Thomas Wolfe (with whom she was rumored to have had an affair), and her famous past all, one suspects, had their appeal for Margaret. Michael Strange was indisputably a woman of the world and Margaret was certain she had much to learn from her.

  Their friendship had thus begun as one of non-equals, and as their relationship took an increasingly emotional and passionate turn, the imbalance between them grew more complex. Just how, and when, that relationship became a sexual one as well is not clear. Michael Strange may well have had sexual liasons with women in the past.40 As far as can be known, Margaret had shown no such interest before, but given her loneliness and her frustrated attempts at love in recent months and years, she probably stood open to the possibility as a worthy experiment in living—just as she had approached painting and writing for children, playwriting, and analysis.

  In the spring of 1943, in any case, Margaret was giving her address as 10 Gracie Square, where Michael Strange was staying temporarily while making other arrangements following her divorce from Harrison Tweed.41 Whether Michael visited Margaret in Maine over the summer is not known, but that October, Margaret gave up her Greenwich Village apartment and moved uptown into a railroad flat across the hall from Michael Strange’s new quarters, just around the corner from Gracie Square, in the browns tone at 186 East End Avenue. Although their relationship was to remain riddled with Runaway Bunny-like, catch-me-if-you-can evasions and ambiguities, they were now living together for all intents and purposes.

  Margaret’s move uptown also marked a farewell to Bank Street and to day-to-day work as Scott’s editor, and the beginning of a new, more independent life of working only for herself.

  She had anticipated her departure from the school earlier in the year, making Bank Street a gift of her rights to three books she had written under Lucy Mitchell’s mentorship, the popular Noisy Book, The Little Fireman, and Bumble Bugs and Elephants. Mitchell’s personal fortune notwithstanding, the school staff was periodically left to grapple with financial crises of one dimension or another. Margaret’s gift, which amounted to an annual contribution in the hundreds of dollars, represented more than a token gesture and was gratefully accepted as such. On November 19, she made a second parting gesture, appearing with Bill Scott on “The Baby Institute,” a weekday-morning radio show hosted by Bank Street nursery school director Jessie Stanton. Reading from a script prepared by Lucy Mitchell and Margaret’s Writers Laboratory colleague Irma Black, the threesome sketched out the basic outlines of the here-and-now philosophy:

  SCOTT: A publisher’s hardest problem is to persuade adults that books which are simple enough for a small child are not too simple.

  STANTON: Possibly that’s because adults forget that the every day things they take for granted are brand new to these children. Things like the taste of a baked potato—the color of the sky—the sound and smell of sizzling bacon—the feel of rain.

  BROWN: And tables and chairs, plates and telephones, animals they know. Children love to find the “here and now” world they know in the heightened experience of a story. Because, as you say, Miss Stanton, this is a wildly exciting new world to them.42

  For listeners well versed in Bank Street theory, the one surprise of the morning came when the panelists agreed that fairy tales were not necessarily unsuitable for the very young, that contrary to what Margaret herself had been taught a few years earlier, some five-year-olds might be ready for such incredible tales after all. (This depended not so much on the child’s chronological age as on his or her individual backlog of experience.)

  Margaret, one suspects, had always known this. She now hoped, in any case, that her career as a writer for children was about to end. Time would tell whether she would succeed in her new work, poetry and fiction writing. In this, as in much else, she trusted that the influence of Michael Strange would be a boon to her, that her revered friend would serve her as an inspiration and a shining example.

  From the front room of her new East End Avenue apartment, Margaret had a direct view of Gracie Mansion, the Mayor’s residence, and more particularly of the mansion’s kitchen. Late at night, she teased friends, she watched Mayor LaGuardia raiding the ice box. Looking past Gracie Mansion, she could see the East River. Wishing to watch the river traffic from bed, Margaret put her bed in the front room; her commodious turned-wood Victorian four-poster nearly filled the small parlor. (Leonard Weisgard remembered the bed as a “room within a room.”)43 First-time visitors were taken aback; one felt as though one had entered the apartment by the wrong door and somehow landed in a more private quarter of the premises than one had planned.

  If Margaret was pleased by the hint of a scandalous life that this arrangement suggested, she also hoped that her new home would afford her fresh opportunities for reflection and renewal. She made the apartment over into a sunlit haven where it would always be summertime. “Yellow curtains looped their rare brightness of yellow organdie over the two wide windows that looked out on the grey day and the darker grey river flowing by,” she wrote in an unfinished story-memoir, “Room and a River.”44 The walls were “all white and yellow with pictures of other summers . . . Renoir’s table laid . . . with fruits and wines and surrounded by the warm rosy flesh he loved so well . . . and more quietly . . . Van Gogh’s apple blossoms . . . incredibly white and pink on the barren bough.”

  Privacy was not to be the primary feature of life at 186 East End Avenue. The doors separating the two facing apartments were generally left unlocked, and as Michael Strange was rarely without visitors, neither was Margaret. Michael may have divorced Harrison Tweed—or convinced herself that she had done so—in order to have the requisite time to herself to realize her literary ambitions, but even in solitude Michael Strange required an audience. And although no longer able to entertain on a grand scale, she kept up the pace of her social activities, both in New York and at her new weekend country home, Under the Hill, in Easton, Connecticut, which had been purchased as part of the divorce settlement. She now even boasted about her reduced circumstances, as though proof were to be found therein of her superiority to the conventions of the merely wealthy. Proud as she was that her china was the best Rockingham, she once announced to a group of guests that every piece she owned was chipped. “I have taken the things that were always kept under glass,” she declared, “and am using them all!”45

  Shuffling about the premises during the day and for evening entertainments were Michael Strange’s longtime butler, Pietro Ricchi—also called “Pierre” in Margaret’s shifting parlance—who divided his time between looking after the domestic needs of “Miss Brown and Miss Strange,” and Mrs. Ethel Malcolm, an elderly woman who cooked and cleaned for them both.

  Pietro was a tall, gauntly elegant silver-haired man. In his youth a member of the Carabinieri, the crack Italian national police, he was a figure of dignified reserve, a man for whom duty and discretion were all. Once, just as the two women were about to drive off for a short trip to Nova Scotia, Michael casually remarked that she hoped Margaret had gone to the bank because she had not remembered to do so. Why no, Margaret said, she had not gone to the bank either. At this, Pietro, who was standing solemnly by, reached into his pocket and produced a roll of bills “thick enough to have choked a horse,” as a friend who was present recalled.46

  “And how much money do you think you’ll need, Miss Strange?” he asked in measured tones. He peeled off a number of bills equal to the amount specified and handed them over to her. Then he turned to Margaret with the same question.

  “Well, I think
I’ll need a little more than that,” she said, naming a sizeable figure. Pietro gave her the money without comment and off the travelers went.

  Pietro was also an excellent cook, and when he took charge of the kitchen for special dinners, his reserves of patience were apt to be tested. On such evenings drinks were usually served in Michael Strange’s apartment, followed by dinner across the hall. Pietro’s delicately prepared northern Italian dishes, however, were more than occasionally ruined when Michael, on a jag of dazzling conversation with some guest, held up the entire party until, when the guests finally crossed over to Margaret’s rooms, the food was cold.

  Unschooled and irrepressibly talkative, Ethel Malcolm, Michael Strange’s longtime housekeeper, could hardly have been more different from Pietro. She spoke an ungrammatical, broken kind of English but was never reluctant to answer back to her imperious employer, who doubtless enjoyed their duels in part because her own verbal superiority was assured. But Michael Strange also plainly admired Malcolm’s feisty spirit—a quality which alone might have been enough to earn her a permanent place in Michael’s household entourage. At times the self-styled high priestess of poetry turned to the elderly working-class woman for practical advice.

  Old theater and society friends were always stopping by. The “incredible Mr. Ted Peckham” (as the Herald Tribune’s society columnist, Lucius Beebe, called him) was a familiar presence.47 The son of a Cleveland industrialist who had lost his fortune in the Depression, Peckham was a born salesman. He had come to New York as a feverishly ambitious young man and through a series of brassy business ventures had installed himself as a conspicuous figure in “smart” society. Peckham ran a widely publicized society escort service, bought and sold fine furs and jewels, and occasionally even wrote a book. But he spent most of his time, it seemed, at parties, sometimes attending a half dozen in a single night, all, as he was quick to confess with a raffish glint in his eye, for the sake of “contacts, contacts!”48