In the Great Green Room

by Amy Gary

  Twenty-one

  1952

  The day before I met you

  The sky was Cobalt blue

  The trees were green

  The birds were still

  The day before I met you

  The day before I met you

  The earth was flat as flat

  My heart was cold

  My thoughts were old

  The day before I met you

  And then that day I met you

  That glorious golden sky

  As you walked in my hair rose up

  My heart was beating too

  I knew your face, I had dreamed your eyes

  Before the day I met you

  “THE DAY BEFORE I MET YOU”

  Unpublished

  In late March, Margaret sat down in her Cobble Court living room for a lengthy interview with a reporter from the News Leader in Richmond, Virginia. Margaret’s hair was cut in a short poodle style, and her curls rested on top of her head. She looked elegant in a tailored gray suit with a beige wrap over her shoulders. The room was decorated with touches of Virginia—dogwood blossoms set off by magnolia leaves. Margaret served tea on her antique French Quimper china, and on the table was a plate of freshly prepared hot cross buns. Margaret and the reporter discussed her strong ties with Virginia, her college days, and childhood visits there. Crispian soon grew impatient waiting for one of the buns and upset the butler’s table, snatching one of the treats and running away, effectively ending the interview. Regardless, Margaret liked what the reporter ended up writing. She weighed twenty pounds more than she wanted, so she was thrilled when she was described as tall and slender in the article. When her clipping service sent her the piece, she underlined those words and added exclamation marks then placed this revised version of the article in her scrapbook. Perhaps it was that article that spurred her cousin Morrie Johnston to invite her to Cumberland Island for an end-of-March vacation.

  Within the week, Margaret was back at Plum Orchard. It was marvelous to see the Johnstons once again. It was still tradition for the Carnegie families to rotate dinners from house to house, and when it was the Johnstons’ turn to host, they held a casual dinner party.

  Margaret took notice when a strikingly handsome young man arrived with a growler of the home brew they called “Sweet Lucy” as his family’s contribution to the meal. He, too, noticed Margaret. She stood at the foot of the house’s grand staircase, inside a graceful wooden alcove. To this man, she looked like a work of art. He made a beeline for her and stayed by her side for the rest of the evening. His name was James Stillman Rockefeller Jr., but he was known to family members as Pebble. He was fifteen years younger than Margaret and was one of the little children she’d played with at his grandparents’ home decades before.

  Their attraction to each other was immediate and grew steadily as they talked throughout dinner and on into the late hours of the night. In the morning, they went for a walk on the beach. Like Margaret, Pebble treasured the sea and the breathtaking beauty of this island paradise. He loved how her golden hair was the same color as the glowing marshlands that surrounded the island. For the rest of her time on the island, Margaret and Pebble seldom left one another’s side. When she had to return to the deadlines and telephones of the publishing world, he made her promise to return as soon as she could.

  * * *

  Back in New York, Margaret questioned the new relationship. Only weeks before, she had been certain she would never love someone again, and now she was just as certain she couldn’t live without Pebble. She’d spent a decade on an analyst’s couch dissecting her dreams and emotions to understand why she chose relationships that were wrong for her. She’d spent her life trying to avoid the same fate as her parents, who had been miserable in their marriage, but she had settled for a miserable love life. Her attraction to Bill Gaston had been detrimental to her self-esteem from the moment she met him. He was a serial philanderer, and she had allowed him to hurt her time and time again. Then there was Michael, whose huge and fragile ego often cloaked their happiness in angst and anger. Margaret had never had a full, mature, and loving relationship. Now she was in love with a much younger man, which Freud would most likely have attributed to a skipped stage in her emotional growth.

  Before long, though, Margaret forced herself to stop worrying. She knew she would damage this relationship by second-guessing every statement, emotion, and motivation. Had a technical explanation of what she was feeling ever changed what she felt? She decided that the scrutiny she put herself through in the past had amounted to nothing more than wasted energy. At the center of it all was fear: fear of being her mother, fear of losing her family, fear of losing Bill or Michael. This time, she wasn’t going to be afraid of what came next. She loved him and knew he loved her. She wasn’t going to miss this chance for happiness. She had spent years in analysis, but this time, she didn’t want to analyze why she was attracted to Pebble. They loved each other. It was as simple as that. She finally felt healed.

  * * *

  Before returning to Cumberland to be with Pebble, she had to straighten out her contract with Golden Books. Georges Duplaix was still in Paris, so she met with her Golden editor, Lucille Ogle, who described the details of the new contract to Margaret. Golden would only be required to accept three, not four, manuscripts per year from Margaret. They weren’t, though, required to publish any of the manuscripts they accepted, but would pay her a small kill fee for any they did not agree to publish. Nor was Golden required to let her know which manuscripts they rejected or accepted until the contract expired. Margaret realized that this could tie up many of her works for years. This was not at all what she and Georges discussed. She was furious and dictated a scathing telegram to Lucille, threatening to never work with Golden again if they didn’t live up to the arrangement she and Georges had first discussed.

  To Georges, Margaret wrote that he should be glad the ocean was between them. She confessed to having lost her temper with Lucille and to having sent a nasty telegram. Then she said that after reflecting on the situation, she would like to send that telegram again. She knew she was his prize author, and the deal was simply unfair. If he didn’t live up to what he had promised, then when she came to France in August she would shoot him with her bow and arrow.

  * * *

  Georges’s recollection of their agreement differed greatly from Margaret’s. In his letter, he tried to lighten the situation by saying he wasn’t certain if the ripples he felt all the way in France came from America’s testing of the atomic bomb or from the explosion between Cobble Court and his offices at Rockefeller Center.

  However frustrated Margaret was, she also knew it was in her best interest to keep her business dealings productive. She was not going to let her relationship with Golden be derailed the way hers had been with Bill Scott. Eager to leave New York, she turned the issue over to Harriet Pilpel to resolve. She also asked Harriet to prepare a will, but to only draft it in a provisional way because she would surely change it many times before it was complete. Short of money once again, she asked Harriet how much it would cost to prepare the will, because most of her money was tied up in Golden’s profits. She wanted to get as far away from the whole mess as possible. She packed her bags, put Crispian in the car, and drove to Florida. She couldn’t wait to be by Pebble’s side again.

  * * *

  Three days later, she was on a dock, listening to a chorus of insects and birds play against the constant swoosh of metal on wood as Pebble drew his plane over his boat, the Mandalay. Pebble was busy preparing the vessel for its maiden voyage around the world. Moored to a small wooden boathouse in the waters of the marsh-lined Intracoastal Waterway, the Mandalay glistened in the bright Florida morning sunlight. Margaret sat and watched Pebble work—his brown back bent over the hull as he slid a plane across the wood, smoothing out the rough edges of the boat. He whistled softly while she looked on with affection. Pebble climbed up to the halyards of the mast and secured the
O in the rigging. He shimmied down with his hunting knife in his belt. He is completely comfortable with himself, Margaret thought. This is a man doing something he loves. Their month together had brought them much closer. Without Pebble ever uttering a formal proposal, both understood that they would spend the rest of their lives together.

  Later that afternoon, Pebble needed to go hunting; it was his turn to find a deer for the family larder. Margaret wanted to go with him. It surprised him that someone who wrote so dearly of little bunnies and furry things also was a hunter. They set off in the family car and parked where the sea and the forest met, where the shoreline was dotted with weathered white branches of ancient oaks. In the wooded dunes, huge tree branches towered high and dipped low to the ground in graceful curves. Margaret remembered these trees from the walks she had taken in these woods with her cousins, how as a child she’d flashed a light into the eyes of toads and a whip-poor-will, then something more frightening. Now, with Pebble by her side, she saw these twisted trees only as a wonderland of plants, animals, sea, and freshwater. He selected a spot beside some bushes, and they perched on a dune to await their prey. A doe passed by, and even though he saw no fawn, Pebble held his fire. Later, when a buck peeked around a tree, he shot, and the deer fell.

  He scrambled down the dune with Margaret right behind, and together they hauled the deer to the shoreline. Pebble used his hunting knife to cut into the deer and remove the organs. Margaret held the still-warm heart in her hands and looked at Pebble. She understood that this wild place and this type of experience made him the man he was, and she loved him all the more for it. Margaret, with the blood of the deer on her hands, her shirt askew and missing a button, could not have been more captivating to Pebble. They rode home in silence, holding hands.

  Days later, as Margaret and Pebble drove along the shore, they spotted a group of people standing at the water’s edge, looking at a shrimper’s little green boat that was caught on the rocks. The boat’s owner and his son stood by, gravely watching as their livelihood and most prized possession got tossed against the rocks with each wave that rolled in. Pebble parked the car and went to talk to the shrimper, who was black, and the island’s caretaker, who was from India and a firm believer in his country’s caste system. The caretaker made it clear he had more important things to do than tow the boat off the rocks. From his manner, Pebble could see that the caretaker thought it was beneath him to help the shrimper, even though losing the boat would cause the shrimper’s financial ruin. Margaret held an excited Crispian away from the crowd and watched as Pebble took off his shirt and shoes. He dove into the surf and swam to the edge of the breakers. From there, he climbed the rocks and boarded the boat. He struggled to free it from the jagged boulders but quickly saw it was no use. The engine was submerged, and the hull was filling with water. He swam back, and Margaret stood close enough to hear him tell the shrimper that he would have to wait for the tide to go out. Maybe, he said, they could make the boat watertight by patching the hole, but she saw from their faces that no one believed the boat could actually be saved.

  The only thing they could do was drive the shrimper and his son to a telephone and arrange a salvage crew for the boat. Later that night, as Pebble and Margaret sat on the front porch, she reflected on the day’s events. She told him the opening line of a story that was forming in her mind. It was about a windup toy boat dancing on the sea that didn’t know it was the last time it would dance. Pebble said it didn’t sound like a children’s story. She assured him it would be. She was only comfortable writing about animals and children—she lost her way when she tried to write for grownups.

  * * *

  Pebble and the men working on his boat lived in old servant quarters on the property. He had hired three men to help build the boat, and two of them would stay on as crew. One night as Margaret made dinner for Pebble’s family, the crew showed up in their sweaty work clothes, expecting to join the feast. Margaret chastised them, saying she couldn’t have all these attractive men wandering around half-naked at her dinner party. One joked that he was wearing his best shirt. Margaret pointed out that it was time to get new clothes when the holes got ahead of the material.

  Then, pointing at Pebble, who was attired only in very short shorts, Margaret said he was going to get all the attention from the ladies that night in the hair shirt he had on. He laughed, but no one changed, hoping to make Pebble’s family and the other dinner guests feel stuffy in their nice clothes.

  The largest mansion on the island was still Mama Carnegie’s Dungeness, although it was abandoned and in slight disrepair. After her death, the fortune of the family had been divided, and no one wanted to take on the costly upkeep of the big house. Pebble and Margaret climbed to the top of the house’s towering cupola and looked out over the marsh. There, they planned their future, and Pebble gave her an engagement ring to formalize their plans to marry. Before the wedding, Pebble and his crew would first sail to Miami, pick up supplies, and then meet Margaret in Panama. Meanwhile, Margaret had to return to New York, organize her affairs for their long getaway, and then meet with music producers in France. Looking out over the marsh, Margaret was reflective. She said she had been only half alive before she met Pebble. She had at last found happiness and peace, adventure, and boundless love, with him.

  When it came time for Pebble to set sail, Margaret christened the boat with a bottle of champagne. Pebble didn’t want to leave, but the sooner he left, the sooner they could be married. They parted the next day, eager to see one another again in three months.

  When Pebble reached Miami, letters from Margaret were waiting for him. He had no ship-to-shore phone, so the letters were their only way to communicate. A crewmate’s girlfriend met the crew there and planned to stay while they restocked the boat and headed on to Panama. However, the whole crew’s plans quickly changed when an opportunity to earn some extra cash on a shrimp boat arose. They decided they would dock in Miami for a month. The girlfriend’s plans soon changed, too. She wanted to stay on with her boyfriend instead of boarding her flight to New York City. She offered Pebble her ticket, and he seized the opportunity to go visit Margaret. He jumped on the flight with nothing but what he was wearing—a pair of shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt.

  Margaret loved surprises, and this was one of the best. She and Pebble stayed for a short time at her high-rise apartment. Margaret borrowed clothes for him and introduced him to her friends. On Cumberland, Pebble had shown Margaret his world; now it was her turn to show him the facets of Manhattan she loved. They had never discussed their age difference; it was of little importance to either of them, and although her friends noticed, it was inconsequential. Margaret had found her match in spirit and adventure. They were thrilled for her and could see how happy she was.

  Crispian, though, wasn’t too sure about Pebble invading their dwellings. The dog only begrudgingly accepted Pebble at the end of his leash if a walk in the park was involved. Pebble believed the best way to someone’s heart was through his or her dog, so he was determined to make friends with the jealous Kerry blue.

  * * *

  The couple cozied up in Cobble Court for a few days in Margaret’s enchanting fur-covered home. Pebble was fascinated by the eccentric touches of Margaret’s writing refuge and the way they had to wind their way through the tenement building. It was like entering a secret world. Pietro kept them fed and cared for as they escaped the real world outside of the tiny house in the middle of skyscrapers.

  Margaret was lost in love. She loved lying together with Pebble’s head on her chest. She loved his curls and the weight of his body on hers. When she first met Pebble, she had worried that he was too much of a boy for someone her age. Now she only saw him as a man.

  After a few days, she took him to the Only House. It had always been a creative getaway filled with unique touches of a life well lived. Now it was infused with the bliss of romance. Margaret placed wildflowers in tiny vases around the house. Pebble watched her plunge into bla
ckberry bushes, seemingly oblivious to their scratchy threats. Her skill at subduing the vines, learned while beagling, reminded him of a pet bear he once had. Oblivious to the thorns, Margaret brought out the best berries from the depths of the bushes.

  When Dot and her children came to visit, they pulled kelp from the seafloor and made grass skirts. One evening, they went on a walk in the setting sun behind her house through the woods. As they drew near to a huge circular stone at the edge of the forest, Margaret shushed the group, warning them to be quiet so they wouldn’t scare the fairy people away. They lay on their bellies in the soft moss, looking under toadstools and leaves for the little people. Laurel swore she saw a little fairy dressed in a purple chiffon dress with blue shoes. As they walked past the rock, Margaret pointed at the pools of water where rainwater collected in the depressions on the rock’s surface. Those, she explained, are where the fairies go to cool off after a night of dancing.

  Alone at the Only House again, Pebble and Margaret watched dusk settle in over their little kingdom. They sat through the rising of the moon, the stars appearing in the dark, dark sky, and the noises of the night animals stirring. During the day, they rowed or sailed around the islands with a bottle of wine cooling in the waters of the sea on a rope that trailed behind them. When a storm blew up, even an expert sailor like Pebble couldn’t right her dilapidated sailboat when it was swamped by the waves. Fortunately, Margaret’s handyman happened by and brought a wet Margaret and Pebble aboard. He told Margaret that she looked better wet than she did dry. Margaret laughed and puffed on her pipe, which was still lit.