In the Great Green Room

by Amy Gary

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For Nap,

  with gratitude for a life of love and laughter

  Foreword

  by James Stillman Rockefeller Jr.

  I met Margaret on Cumberland Island, Georgia. This magical place, a step back in time, belonged to my mother’s family and is now a national park. The year was 1952. Margaret was there as a guest of my cousin, and I was there outfitting my boat, an old Friendship sloop, prior to setting out for the South Pacific.

  Our eyes first met in my Kentucky cousins’ 1892 mansion with four towering Corinthian columns that rose from a broad lawn studded with giant live oaks. Tall cedars lined the curving oyster-shell road leading to the front steps that ascended to a Gone with the Wind porch and a huge front door framed with bronze sconces.

  In a room smelling of gun oil and bourbon, she stood next to the gun rack. She looked at me from under her straw-colored hair, with blue-gray eyes that studied me, went through me, while absorbing everything in sight. I knew instantly this was a turning point in my young life. We moved toward each other, the rest of the room faded, and the next morning, shortly after dawn, we were walking on the high dunes overlooking the beach, hand in hand.

  With the sunrise, she told how she wrote children’s books. Seventy-two to date. The latest was called The Noon Balloon. And she told how the Queen Mother of England kept Little Fur Family by her bedside. The image of such a regal person keeping something so small and fuzzy so close amused Margaret.

  She contemplated the rolling surf and said, “I hope to write something serious one day as soon as I have something to say. But I am stuck in my childhood, and that raises the devil when one wants to move on.”

  In the days to come, I saw how she walked in her own sunrise and sunset, cloaked in the mists of her art that hid the petty daily doings from sight until she was forced to face them. I remember her saying, “Evening is like morning to me—full of change and renewal and excitement. My low time is from eleven to lunch. At noon, the light is all glaring and blatant, and some of the magic seems gone from the day.”

  She left Cumberland for her publishing world all too soon. We wrote each other most every day. I told her about Diana, the pet deer, who hung around the house with her offspring. She was in the process of writing a book for Osa Johnson about Osa’s African adventures. She wrote back, “The first time I ever held a baby lion cub in my arms it was just like a living toy or a child, a dream come true. And that warm clean smell of that little armful of something I couldn’t believe was real, and the tenderness of that small great beast will always fill me with wonder. Love, Tim.” Margaret had many nicknames: Tim, the Bunny, and the Bunny-no-good. I called her my bunny, and she called me her warlock, as I looked so fierce in my dark beard.

  When she returned to Cumberland for her second visit, I worked on the boat, while she explored the island with all its wildlife. She soon had stories about all of them. Listening to her, one wasn’t sure whether people acted like animals or animals like people. Mr. and Mrs. Toad would come out every evening as we sat sipping wine on the steps of my grandfather’s house. She asked them what they did in their spare time and if they didn’t get tired sleeping on their tummies, especially if they were full of juicy bugs. I wondered how many books would come out of Cumberland.

  A day before she left, we sat in the cupola of the original family mansion, now long deserted. Looking out over the marsh, thinking about the month we had just spent together growing ever closer, it was impossible to foresee a life without her. It was then she said, as much to herself as me, “You can never in this world love anyone you love enough.”

  We talked of a future together, how I would sail the boat to Panama and she would go to Europe and then meet me in Panama. We would get married, sail the Pacific, and move on to further horizons.

  After Cumberland that summer, we spent idyllic days at the Only House, her Maine island paradise. She called it the Only House because “you could see no other light at night.” The Gothic little building with its steeply pitched roof and weathered clapboards nestles in a tiny meadow of wildflowers. At the front of the house, a granite wharf juts into the small bay with its little islands, while at the back, a spruce forest forms a curtain to hold the outside world at bay. The only access is by water.

  Margaret had written to me about the place. “The song sparrow is singing and a clowning gull is trying to crow like a rooster, cluck like a hen and laugh like a gentle maniac, all at the same time. The house is a boat. Only the weathers and the fog and the times of day and night sail by the house instead of the house sailing away.”

  During those halcyon days spent with her there, she showed me the fairy ballroom, a weathered rock clearing high above Hurricane Sound, where the little people danced at midnight. Then there was the magic mouse and his house down a hole beside the path. Of an evening, we would stand in the ballroom and watch the dusk enfold the sound. Often those eyes of hers would go far away where none but she could go. One evening, she turned suddenly and said, “We are born alone. We go through life alone. And we go out alone.”

  I will never forget that moment, painful as the words were. She saw herself in a frame where human beings were but one component of a larger whole. To me, walking in the pastures of her imagination was like strolling through an enchanted forest. I saw her as an island in a limitless sea, radiating light farther than any lighthouse.

  It has been sixty years since those days, but over a half century later, her light is burning ever brighter.

  A Note from the Author

  For over twenty-five years, I’ve tried to live inside the wildly imaginative mind of Margaret Wise Brown. In 1990, I co-owned a small publishing company, and we worked with Margaret’s sister, Roberta, to reprint four of Margaret’s out-of-print and mostly forgotten books. Children’s publishing was again on the rise, and librarians still treasured Margaret’s works. We hoped to bring many more of her titles back to market, so one afternoon I found myself sitting on the floor of Roberta’s house in Jamaica, Vermont, looking through the bookshelf that was filled with Margaret’s books.

  I had become friends with Roberta over the years as we worked together. We both had horses and collie dogs; we both had strong ties to Hollins University. Margaret graduated from that school, as did her mother. Almost all the women in my husband’s family were Hollins alumnae—in fact, his great-grandmother had attended Hollins at the same time as Margaret and Roberta’s mother.

  Riffling through that shelf of books that day in Vermont, it suddenly struck me that I should ask Roberta if Margaret had left behind any unpublished manuscripts. Margaret had been prolific, and she died very suddenly. That meant there was a strong possibility that quite a few manuscripts had been left unpublished or unfinished. I hesitated before asking because Margaret is considered one of the foremost writers of children’s literature; educational programs at universities study her writing techniques. Goodnight Moon is a
perennial bestseller, and many of the books she wrote for Golden still hold spots on their spinner racks in bookstores, drugstores, and department stores around the world. I figured that if Margaret had left a manuscript behind, surely another publisher would have discovered it long before I.

  I was surprised by Roberta’s answer that yes, Margaret had been working on a large collection of poetry when she died. She’d called it The Green Wind. Unfortunately, that manuscript was in storage in the attic of Roberta’s barn; she would have to get the neighbor boy to bring down the heavy trunk.

  Almost six months passed before Roberta called to invite me to come look at the manuscript. I arrived on a cold winter’s day in January, driving along snowy roads to get to her lovely farm at the base of the Green Mountains. When I walked in, Roberta was filling out sweepstakes coupons, the sort that had Ed McMahon as their spokesperson. I felt sorry for this divorced woman who lived alone in the woods of Vermont, hoping for a financial bonanza to arrive at her door.

  Roberta opened the trunk. Inside were thin papers stacked end to end. She pointed to one end and said that The Green Wind manuscript was there. All the other papers in the trunk were unpublished, too. At first, I didn’t believe her. There were hundreds of papers in that trunk! Songs, music scores, stories, and poems. I thought surely I had misunderstood, or maybe Roberta was mistaken. It seemed unlikely that even someone as prolific as Margaret could have left behind all these manuscripts.

  I took a stack of the papers back to my hotel that night. Their musty smell was too much to bear in the small room, so I opened a window to let the frigid Vermont air in as I read over each of the works. I didn’t recognize a single one of them.

  Now that these gems had been uncovered, I was terrified they might disappear. I spent the next three days copying every piece of paper in that trunk, making a circuit between Roberta’s house, the bank to get quarters, and the local library, where the only copying machine in town was located.

  The trunk held manuscripts and ideas for books that were years ahead of their time. Books with flaps and die cuts. Books that emerged from balls and toy barns. Stories written for the backs of cereal boxes. And songs, lots of songs. I hadn’t known Margaret loved music and was hoping to write popular songs that made it onto jukeboxes.

  From that day to this, I have spent the better portion of my career working with Margaret’s papers, and it is a pleasure to work in her rarefied air. I have studied her contracts, read her diaries and letters, talked with her friends and loved ones. She gave me an education on how to work with illustrators and how to negotiate a contract. More important, she showed me how to live with awe and to love with abandon. For that, I am especially grateful.

  Prologue

  1950

  First cry

  Of the first hound.

  And then other cries

  Till it’s all one cry

  Across the fields.

  First spring

  I have ankles and hinged feet.

  An old body

  Rises up in the new

  And leans forward into the wind.

  “RUNNING TO HOUNDS”

  White Freesias

  On a crisp, cold morning in January of 1950, a crowd of almost seventy people, clad in tweeds and corduroys, knee-high boots, and warm jackets, gathered at the stables of the large estate on the north shore of Long Island waiting for the call from the hunt master. The day’s hunt was to be a course of more than ten miles extending across neighboring estates. The direction of the expedition would ultimately be determined by the hounds’ chase of the hares. The rain from the previous evening had softened the ground, making for steadier downhill running for the hunters. On hard ground, it was easy to slip. The rains also removed all traces of lingering snow, which held the scent of hares long gone.

  Some of the beagling clubs had resorted to hunting cottontails instead of the imported jacks as these hunts grew less and less successful. Sprawling country estates were being divided by creeping suburbanization. An Austrian jackrabbit was spotted the day before almost a mile northwest, so the field would travel in that direction.

  The hunt master readied his horn and blew for the hunt to begin. The crowd followed the hounds at a rapid clip across the road and onto a newly plowed field. The beagles were of the shorter variety, only fourteen inches at their withers, so runners could keep up. They ran far behind the dogs to avoid contaminating the trail. They picked their way around bushes, fences, and thick forests, hoping to be the first to the site of the kill and earn the trophy from that day’s hunt—a coveted mask or pad of the rabbit. The group followed the dogs over a hill and into a valley.

  Margaret Wise Brown drove up in her yellow convertible after the field had crested the horizon. She liked to arrive late and knew she would have no trouble catching up to the group. This one day of the week away from the city and her busy life of telephone calls and deadlines was her favorite time. She might walk alone, or run behind the group in silence. Most of the time, though, she found herself chatting effortlessly for six or seven miles with someone who owned a stable of Thoroughbred racehorses—or the person who mucked the stalls of those same horses. A shared desire to run with the hounds was the common bond.

  She parked her car near the kennel and walked down the road. A man near a barn pointed, and she took off running in that direction. She soon heard the crooning release of the hounds as they spotted a hare and the cry of “Tallyho!” to her right. They were beyond the woods, past a furrowed field. She adjusted her course to intersect with the dogs, leaping over the small, even rises of dark dirt that were littered with frozen pink and white turnips too small to harvest. She liked the popping sound they made under her sneakers and timed her pace to land on the little bulbs as she made her way to the trees.

  Her stamina and agility often placed her at the front of the throng. She was known to plunge fearlessly through a thicket rather than around it, as most of the hunters opted to do. Those scratchy shortcuts won her more than a few rabbits’ feet. As she approached the woods, she realized she would have to skirt this patch of trees. Horse brier vines covered the ground, and even she was no match for their fierce stickers. She passed the woods and looked for a path in the valley beyond. A trail would eventually appear, she was sure. It always did.

  She ran lightly, pulling herself up by her shoulders as she sprinted through the green and red grasses of the valley. The past few months had taken a toll on her body and spirit. She desperately wanted to lose the twenty pounds she had gained since her lover had left her. Most evenings, wine seemed a better remedy for her loneliness than exercise.

  Running in these fields, though, Margaret once again felt young. She had grown up here, and she had spent many afternoons of her youth riding her horse through these same pastures. She had swum in the nearby ocean and built houses of sticks and leaves in these forests.

  She saw a trail of trampled grass and broken sticks and instantly knew it was a path the dogs had made. She followed it up the hill and on the next rise saw one of the whips coaxing a dog back on course with the snap of his whip while at a full run, something she had yet to conquer. She caught up to him as the pack circled a dead hare in the grass. The dogs were particularly excited; they hadn’t hunted for a few days, and it would be hard to pull them back. The master called the dogs down and then reached in to grasp the body of the bunny. He held it high above his head, an indication to the dogs that this prize was no longer theirs. The pack reluctantly obeyed.

  It was clear this rabbit was dead before the dogs had found it, shot by a frustrated farmer, no doubt. As the rest of the runners drew close, two gunshots were fired in the distance. Margaret quipped that two more rabbits had just been killed, which drew a round of chuckles from the field. In reality, she always felt sorry for the death of the rabbit, especially if it were one that had escaped before.

  Suddenly, there was a stir among the hounds. Then they went still. Their quickening sniffs meant another hare was close
by. The master shouted to the field to hold hard, and all the hunters froze, allowing the dogs to pick up the new scent. The dogs flushed a hare from a patch of grass, and once again the hunt was on. The jack bounded across the field, then darted sideways. Margaret knew the poor bunnies often circled back in desperation. Sometimes this tactic worked, but if the rabbit ran straight, the hounds could seldom keep pace. Sooner or later, though, it would run for home or cover, and the attempted escape often sent the bunny straight into people or hounds instead of an open field.

  This one, though, burst onto a grassy road and sped away from the dogs and humans. He held his ears high and straight as he bounced out of sight. That, Margaret thought, was a beautiful thing to see.

  One

  1910–1914

  Once upon a summertime

  A bug was crawling on a vine

  A butterfly lit on a daisy

  While a little bee

  Buzzed himself crazy in a wild pink rose

  And a child ran through the wet green grass

  In his bare feet and wiggled his toes

  “ONCE UPON A SUMMERTIME”

  The Unpublished Works of Margaret Wise Brown

  The moon and sky over Brooklyn, New York, was bathed in the golden hue of an aurora borealis in the early morning hours of May 23. Sheet lightning to the south and east illuminated the shifting rays in a staccato dance of light. As the rising sun diminished the auroral lights, panic rose in the house of Bruce and Maude Brown. The baby they had been expecting more than two weeks earlier was now arriving in a rush. But the doctor was nowhere to be found.

  Bruce was seriously ill with malaria contracted on a recent business trip and could be of little help. His nurse and Maude’s mother prepared, as best they could, to deliver the baby. Anna, their stern Irish nanny, paced the downstairs entry with the Brown’s two-year-old son, Gratz, waiting for the doctor to arrive. Maude’s screams in the final throes of labor were heard throughout the house and out the open door as the doctor dashed in. He bounded up the stairs, rolling his shirtsleeves as he climbed, reaching the bedside just in time to deliver the baby girl. He held her up for her mother to see, his cuff links still dangling from his sleeves.