Shortly before departing for Cumberland Island, and in the same spirit of putting her affairs in order, Margaret sent Harriet Pilpel the general outlines of a new will. “I am going off in the car for another 2,000 miles,” she told her lawyer, “and again it occurs to me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a Will to sign . . . so that the rapacious State of New York cannot take one-third of my horse brasses and Crispian.”31 She expected to be back in the city around the start of summer and looked forward, she said, to “that remote day outside a telephone booth in late June” when the two of them might meet, cloak-and-dagger-style, to “discuss those unsuspected obscurities of legal language” of which wills and contracts were made.
Once back on Cumberland Island, Margaret put most thoughts of work out of her mind. She and James Rockefeller were very much in love. She was happier in his company than she had been in years.
Exploring the island also gave her great pleasure. In a letter to her Doubleday editor, Margaret Lesser, she reported that she was “too busy watching to take pictures or notes or write.”32 Besides, she said, art did not “work that way” for her—as a matter of willed attention. “Years from now a great sea turtle will crawl out of the sea and over the page to lay its eggs in the sand at night”—that is, she would write a new picture book or poem or short story— “and I’ll wonder where it came from.” Crispian, she said, had gotten into an altercation the previous day with some wild hogs. “I jumped into a palmutta [sic] bush and pulled him off and the only two casualties were the pigs [sic] ear and me.”
One business matter seemed pressing enough to warrant a gingerly tug at the editor’s sleeve. A new collaboration with Leonard Weisgard, Little Frightened Tiger, had been much delayed. Margaret inquired, “Tiger Tiger burning bright—What goes on there?”
It was great fun, she said,
being here in a household of men [James Rockefeller and his comrades] about to sail arround [sic] the world. I mend the holes in their pants and we cook up out of Jim Beards [sic] cook-book shark meat, venison, and turtle eggs, and paint the boat and roam the beaches. They are all writers—as well—and no one gets any quarter.
She was considering flying down to the Virgin Islands from New York in October (there were to be several variations on her plan) to rejoin them there. “Will you send me a copy of Kon Tiki— author’s discount—to Maine. I want to see what’s ahead.”
Margaret also had a message for her editor’s young daughter: “Tell Kiki I hope she grows a big red beard. That would surprise her.” (Pebble had already grown a black one.)
Margaret had brought along copies of two books she had edited in the early days at Scott. One of these, chosen most likely in anticipation of new travel adventures of her own, was The Log of Christopher Columbus. The other was Posey Hurd’s Hurry Hurry. Margaret regretted having never reestablished friendly relations with Bill Scott following their legal troubles over the Noisy Books. From Cumberland, she wrote Scott reminding him of the voluminous subtitle of Posey’s book: Hurry Hurry: A Tale of Calamity and Woe; or, A Lesson in Leisure, Relating the dire mishaps which befell a certain nurse who went too fast, together with a faithful account of her Reform, the whole comprising a powerful Lesson.
Did Margaret now believe she had been too quick to mistrust Scott in her dealings with his firm? Had she, too, learned some unspecified “powerful Lesson?” She let these suggestions hang in the air as she waxed nostalgic: “We will never be as right again as we were instinctively in that first rebellion we all created to-gether in Children’s Books,—or have as much fun.”33 Brushing formality aside, she added, “This is just a friendly letter and why not after all these hectic over busy years. Again I’m trying to step out of it. The insane rush.” Perhaps for the first time in her life Margaret no longer felt the need to prove herself. She was on Cumberland, she wrote, visiting “four fellows who are about to take three years to sail arround [sic] the world to see for themselves if people are really so different anywhere in it or on it.” She hoped to accompany them for at least part of their journey. In the meantime she wondered if the Scotts would join her one evening that fall for dinner at Cobble Court.
Scott thanked her for her “good letter and for the spirit which prompted . . . it” and said he would be happy to see her again.34 He preferred, however, not to view the past with nostalgia. “No one and no thing that lives stands still,” he reminded her in a mild rebuke that sounded vaguely like a cross between a Bank Street geography lesson and a sermon. “Even the earth and seas and mountains slowly change. It’s up to us to see that the change is constructive.”
Lofty analogies were hardly needed to drive home the point that the lives of many in their initial little group had changed dramatically since the time they first began making books together in the late thirties. Bill Scott had recently seen Leonard Weisgard on a city bus. A flustered, gangling odd-man-out when he had first met him, Weisgard now looked self-assured sitting beside his wife and their baby daughter.
Margaret made no effort to conceal her age from the much younger James Rockefeller. She joked about it, telling him that her age “kept changing” and so could not easily be guessed. Whether she was more concerned about their difference in years than she acknowledged is less clear. She dated a note from Cumberland to Ursula Nordstrom “May 23, 1952—20 yrs old.”35 Perhaps this was just a reminder of her birthday should the editor be in a gift-giving mood, but Margaret, of course, had not turned twenty but forty-two.
Arriving in New York in mid-June, she telephoned Luther Greene to say she had brought someone back with her from Cumberland who had nothing to wear but a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals. She wondered if Luther might possibly lend the young man some clothes. When Greene learned that Margaret’s ill-clad companion was a Rockefeller, he was delighted. He took an immediate liking to Pebble, and afterwards thought that the time Margaret spent with him must have been the happiest period of her life. After a brief stop in Connecticut, where she introduced Pebble to her now-married friend Jessica Gamble Dunham, the couple continued on to the Only House where they stayed for the rest of the summer. By then, Margaret and James Rockefeller had decided to marry.
“Here I go—out to sea with my fog horn,” Margaret wrote from Maine to Alvin Tresselt, the editor of a soon-to-be-inaugurated children’s magazine, Humpty Dumpty.36 She had promised to compose a poem about the magazine’s namesake for the premiere issue and was having trouble coming up with a version that Tresselt liked. “I’ll tie up at the black buoy,” she vowed, “and write you some more verses.” Endlessly reworked nonsense stanzas shuttled back and forth between New York and the Only House all summer. But nothing Margaret did pleased the editor and in exasperation she finally gave up. She had pulled order out of chaos many times in the last several months, but apparently even she could not put Humpty Dumpty back together.
Keeping an eye on her other business affairs, she wrote Harriet Pilpel to ask whether her new contract with Golden Books, over which the fur had so recently flown, would soon be ready as promised for her signature. In late August she and Pebble were back in New York for a few hectic weeks of socializing.
As Margaret contemplated married life, she reconsidered the details of her new will. In a note to her executors she expressed the wish to be buried in the Brown family plot in Oakhill Cemetery in Kirkwood, Missouri. Evidently she wanted to be certain that this conciliatory gesture toward her family would not be mistaken for a renunciation of the years she had spent with Michael Strange:
for a tombstone, I would like the square block of granite which forms at this moment the second step from the top as you come out of the left-hand front door towards the sea of the new house I built for Michael Strange in Maine. This piece of granite has a hole in it and I would like on it the following inscription:
MARGARET WISE BROWN
Born Died
Writer of Songs and Nonsense
It is my desire that this stone be left in the rough.37
Just a day
later, however, she changed her mind, and an attorney with the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst wrote to the United States Coast Guard’s New York headquarters on her behalf to inquire whether their client’s wish to be buried at sea by the Coast Guard could possibly be satisfied. “In our many years of experience,” the lawyer continued, barely concealing his amusement, “we have never heard of such an arrangement and we would like to have further particulars on this.”38 The Coast Guard’s Legal Section was quick to respond to this “rather unique proposal” with a diplomatic no.39
One evening Margaret gave a small party for her fiancé in the garden at Cobble Court. A few days later she and Pebble and Charles Shaw drove down to Chinatown for dinner. (“Alas!, as I feared,” Shaw wrote in his diary, “This type of thing is no longer my cup of tea.”)40 From New York, Rockefeller intended to rejoin his crewmates in Miami and to sail from there to the Virgin Islands on the first leg of the great adventure. Margaret, before rendezvousing with him, wanted to spend some time resting up for the rough-and-tumble journey in more luxurious surroundings. On Tuesday, September 23, James Rockefeller, Dorothy Ripley, and a few others saw her off as she set sail on the cruise ship Vulcania for Cannes.
The off-season ocean crossing proved to be restful indeed. Her cabin had a private balcony. The food was excellent. Even Crispian was well provided for. “Crispin’s [sic] dinner,” she wrote Dorothy from on shipboard, “is small cubed beef and meats with finely chopped vegetables that a steward brings him . . . at six.”41 The boat was uncrowded. Among her fellow passengers were the director of the cruise line, the Italian consul general, several doctors, an “attractive Italian couple—Conte and Contessa Hypolite or some such name and some darling young nuns from Ohio who are going to Rome to take charge of 60 little 52 yr olds.”
The relaxed pace of the voyage gave Margaret a chance to reflect on recent events and contemplate the future. “I can see,” she told Dorothy, “why Pebble says the sea is unconfused and uncomplicated. . . . You know your adversaries and its [sic] a clean fight.” Before leaving, Margaret had given away to friends many of the books in her library. Some of the recipients had thought this odd, but she was only house cleaning, preparing to start over fresh: “This is more than just a trip. I don’t think I’ll ever live the old life I led in New York again. I’ve left the city. High time. It was like living in a telephone booth.”
The Vulcania dropped anchor in Cannes on October 2. From there Margaret headed by train for a brief visit to Italy, then returned to the south of France, reaching the secluded medieval coastal village of Eze by October 12. An old friend of Michael’s, Walter Varney, had taken up residence there as the manager of the Chateau Barlow, a hotel cradled high in the hills, with splendid views of the Mediterranean directly below.
With the attentive, elderly Monsieur Varney—Margaret called him the “Wizard of Eze”—at her beck and call, and with all the privacy she could want, she settled in behind thick stone walls, in a room that opened onto an interior courtyard.42
Her new Golden Book, Mister Dog, had already been published in a French-language edition, and Margaret brought some copies with her to present to the town’s children. The original “Monsieur Chien,” Crispian, promptly got himself into a brawl with one of the local dogs by the village fountain and for once suffered a complete rout. Margaret lamented his stunning reversal of fortune in a little poem:
The Crispian Blues
Bitten on the bottom
In my first fight in France
Why did I not
Wear a pair of pants?
Zut
Et crotte
Zis
Ees
Not cricket.43
Troubled by her own recent battle of words with Posey Hurd, Margaret scribbled a conciliatory postcard to her. Their relations over the last several months had been such that she had not yet gotten around to telling Posey and Clem that she planned to marry.
“Dearest Pose—A long way from home in The Town of Pretend. Then heading for the Caribbean and even across the Pacific. I fell in love with a sailor.”44 Of their latest collaboration she wrote:
Have given one final and vast struggle to pull our flippent [sic] and overserious efforts together. I loved your continuation of my nonsense and I think for all its foolishness it gave the book a push in the right direction. You take it on from here. . . . Hail and Farewell. Love, Juniper.
Margaret made the short drive to Saint-Paul-de-Vence to visit Jacques Prévert and thank him for having quoted from her picture book Les Chatons barbouilleurs (The Color Kittens) in his own poetry collection, Spectacles.
On an impulse, she decided to make a second trip to Florence, borrowing the equivalent of three hundred dollars for this purpose from a friend of Walter Varney’s. (Her bank account was for the moment once again overdrawn.) Her plans changed suddenly, however, when on Thursday, October 30, she was stricken with an acute abdominal pain and rushed to the nearest hospital, the Clinique des Dames Augustines in Nice.
During the postwar years, French hospitals were generally considered inferior to those in the United States. As a sensible travel precaution, Margaret was carrying an identity card with instructions to take her to the American Hospital in Paris in the event of an emergency. In the present circumstances, however, travel was clearly inadvisable.
The next day she went into surgery. The exploratory phase of the operation revealed an ovarian cyst, which the surgeon removed. As a precaution, her appendix was also removed. She stood the operation well and was expected to make a full recovery.
Writing in longhand on her Cobble Court stationery, Margaret drafted a codicil to her will while awaiting surgery. In this document, she reaffirmed her love for James Rockefeller and settled what she considered an outstanding debt to Walter Varney. To Varney, who had lately been a help to her and had in the past been a good friend to Michael Strange, she made a bequest of two thousand dollars—and Crispian, if he wanted the dog. She asked that the two family members who were named in her will, Roberta and her cousin Judy, allow Pebble to “have anything of mine he wants since he is closest to me” and to have the use of her East End Avenue apartment and Cobble Court.45 “He has the keys and I consider these places to be his home as well as my own.” Her body was to be cremated, the ashes to be given to him to be scattered in the Atlantic. At the bottom of the page Margaret wrote, “witnesses October 30, 1952” and beside this added the numerals 1,2, and 3 in a column and the formula “My own handwriting is my witness.”
Under French law, this method of witnessing the codicil was legal and binding. How Margaret knew this is not known; plainly, however, she took care to handle the matter properly.
While recovering from her surgery, Margaret had plenty of time for letter writing. In a lighthearted missive to Garth Williams, she compared the winged white caps of the hospital nurses to the sails of ships gliding effortlessly in and out of port.46 As she wrote this to Williams, her thoughts were no doubt racing toward her sailor friend, James Rockefeller. In a letter to him, she was rather less guarded: “I’ve never been in a situation like this before, a big helpless creature becoming younger and younger.”47
Before Margaret took ill, Ursula Nordstrom had written her at Eze, remarking that with the first anniversary of their Book Week meeting between the library lions fast approaching she thought it “mighty strange” that she had still not received her promised gift of three stuffed owls.48 Margaret replied from the hospital that she had rounded up two of the owls and would now “have to shoot a third or catch it alive.” She claimed she and Crispian had recently “travelled in a compartment at night with six hunters and an owl in a train to Pisa from Florence. They were going to shoot larks in the morning. . . . The hunters shoot the little birds and cook them on a spit with their eyes still glaring.”49 Having done her best to give the editor a little shock, Margaret continued in a lighter vein. The hunters, she said, “passed me the basket and when I looked inside I looked deep into the eyes of an o
wl. (Nearer than I ever got in the library.) . . . I take Crispin [sic] around with me the way Ike takes Mamie.”
Kind nuns attended her, she wrote Leonard Weisgard. “[They] reach deep in their pockets like big rabbits and pull out pills, trying not to laugh to [sic] much.”50 Except for the first three days, she had been enjoying the experience. “Everyone is so human. The old rattlebag chambermaid sings musichall songs and closes the window so ‘her little rabbit’ won’t catch cold and I have a wonderful time with one of the younger ones”—the attendant with whom Margaret said she had gone a few rounds at boxing. “The room is full of flowers that Walter brings in and everyone is here but Crispin [sic]. I send him a sandwich every day.”
Weisgard had recently been commissioned to design a West Coast production of the Nutcracker ballet. Cheering him on, Margaret expressed her delight that her old friend had at last gotten a chance to realize one of his longstanding ambitions. She was beginning to see some of her own long-term goals come into view. She thought, for one thing, that her analysis was proving to be ever more helpful to her. “I seem to feel increasing freedom to act,” Margaret said, “and to censor my imediate [sic] mistakes.”
Margaret had never taken for granted her talent as a writer. As she wrote Weisgard, she no more took love for granted now:
I had great chance in meeting Pebble. Someone who[m] all my hearts can love and who[m] my deepest one admires and knows. I have never known such tenderness. No more separations! And my one hope is that I will always be able to make him happy. We are rarely given that chance in life and it is a big thing.
According to one plan under consideration, Margaret was to meet her fiancé in Panama, where they would marry and set sail on the transpacific leg of the voyage. For the moment she intended to rest and get well. “How like a child getting younger and younger it is,” she wrote, “to lie up here in a big blue hospital room. My doctor is old fashioned and doesn’t believe in jumping up right away.” (The routine practice in American hospitals was to get a patient ambulatory within a day or two of surgery.)
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