The spring term started on March 6, 1961. Molly Punderson was then sixty-four, a year younger than Rockwell. Although she had inherited what her relatives termed derisively “the Punderson nose,” she had clear blue eyes and a gaze that seemed exceptionally alert. She wore her white hair pinned up in a bun, with a stiffly lacquered curl on each side of her face. In June 1959, after thirty-nine years of teaching at the Girls’ School of Milton Academy, she had retired and moved back to Stockbridge.
Molly knew a class clown when she saw one. “He was no great student,” she recalled of Rockwell. “He skipped classes, made amusing remarks, and livened up the sessions.”2
She was surprised that someone as famous as he was could be so free of self-importance. She could not have known that his mood, his way with people, could turn stone cold in a matter of seconds. For a widower, he struck her as uncommonly genial, buoyant even, with his barely repressed playfulness and ceaseless pipe smoking, which continued in her poetry class. As she stood in the front of the room posing earnest questions about T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” she tried not to be distracted by his fussing with the pipe.
From the beginning, he found her appealing, this older school teacher, wife of no one, mother of no one, disciplined memorizer of thousands of poems. He had always admired English teachers, admired their learning, their familiarity with novels he wished he had read. He admired women who could recite passages from Shakespeare from memory, as if in compensation for his own lack of reading or scholastic accomplishment. Molly Punderson was no doubt one of the best-read individuals in Stockbridge. She had majored in English at Radcliffe (class of 1919) and spent her junior year in England, which she considered life-changing.
Molly, obviously, had a good deal in common with Rockwell’s deceased wife. Like Mary Rockwell, she harbored a passion for literature and occasionally wrote a poem herself, in daring free verse. But unlike Mary, Molly was sturdy and self-contained, flinty in the classic New England manner. She was the sort of woman who was always deploring things with visible conviction, one whose ancestors had delivered fiery sermons in black Puritan garb. Her righteousness made her both likable and unlikable, depending on whom you asked. She was said to be popular at Milton Academy, where successive generations of Milton girls from established families who had first encountered the Canterbury Tales and Hamlet under her demanding tutelage spoke kindly of Miss Pundy, as everyone called her. She was well-versed in the modernists, too. Her favorite poet was T. S. Eliot and she felt honored to be teaching at the very prep school that young Tom had attended years earlier.
But within her own family, Molly commanded less admiration. She clashed frequently with her older brother and only sibling, Frank Punderson, a good-natured businessman who ran a coal and wood company in Springfield, Massachusetts. Molly disapproved of his (Republican) politics and the books he read. He and his wife, Beulah, had three children, and one Christmas when Aunt Molly made a rare appearance at their home, the children realized with crushing disappointment that she had arrived from the fashionable, shop-lined streets of Boston without a single gift—except for a bag of dusty, brown pine cones that she had collected on country walks. As she distributed the booty between her niece and two nephews, she cheerfully decried “the ugly display of commercialism under the Christmas tree.”3
True, she made efforts toward her niece, Nancy Punderson. In the summer, when Molly was back in Stockbridge, she would invite Nancy to visit for a few days at a stretch. Even as a teenager, Nancy knew that Aunt Molly was not like other aunts. Here was a woman who, as if in defiance of the rules of auntdom, declined to bubble with affection and encouragement. “She was an Anglophile with a British accent, and she said I had such ordinary intelligence,” Nancy recalled years later.
When it was time for Nancy to apply to college, Molly personally administered the SATs to her. “She gave me a 300 on the test,” she recalled. Molly was qualified to grade the test because she had served for many years on the Committee of the College Entrance Examination Board,4 which required her to attend meetings in Princeton, and come up with questions on grammar and vocabulary.
For their first date, Rockwell invited Molly to a play that had just opened in Pittsfield. This occurred one evening in June, on the cusp of summer, after Molly’s poetry-discussion group had ended for the season and Peggy Best had flown to Paris with her two teenage children. It had been arranged that Rockwell’s son Peter would run Peggy’s gallery in her absence. She planned to remain abroad all summer, leaving Rockwell free to court Molly without feeling like a traitor.
By October, he would be married again.
* * *
Molly is not known to have had any male suitors before she met Rockwell. Rather, her closest relationships were with two single women: Dorothy Kendall, who taught history at Milton; and Helen Rice, an accomplished violinist from Stockbridge. Her sense of being on her own, of being a woman without a man, had come early. “I was too shy or solemn or something to be socially any kind of light,” she recalled of her childhood in Stockbridge. “I loved Sunday school, even. I am ashamed to admit it.”5
She had grown up in modest circumstances, at 51 Main Street, in a narrow wood house that was close to the road, not set back like the grander houses. Her father was the manager of the Red Lion Inn and stayed in the job for six decades. In the winter, when the inn was closed, he replaced old floorboards and plastered chipped walls and tended to broken things. His wife, sadly, was beyond repair. Molly described her mother as a “semi-invalid” who seldom left the house. According to family lore, Clara Edwards, a descendant of the great theologian Jonathan Edwards, gave birth to Frank (in 1895) and Molly (on September 15, 1896) in the space of only seventeen months, then blithely announced: “I’ve done my duty to God and the world, and now God and the world can take care of me.” She took to her bed and got up in coming years as infrequently as possible.
Later, once she moved away, Molly thought of Stockbridge as the provinces, earnest but largely irrelevant, inhabited by the townspeople of her childhood and their small, unchanging problems. Granted, she did venture home every summer for the long break, staying in a two-room cottage she and her father built together in 1936. Topside, as she called it, was located on her parents’ property, halfway up the steep, grassy hill that constituted their backyard. With its screened porch and gardens all around, the cottage had a certain dwarfish charm.
In June 1959, when Molly retired from teaching, she moved back to Stockbridge. By then her parents were no longer alive. Having no desire to live in the house of her childhood, she continued to rent it out and reside in her little backyard cottage.
Truth be told, she had a grand ambition. She wanted to write what used to be called a “grammar”—it no more needed the word book appended to it than did the Holy Bible. She believed her grammar would be a wholly original production. “She invented a system of diagramming sentences that was different from the traditional one,” recalled Kate More, a former student of hers (Milton ’49) who edited the school literary magazine and grew up to become an English teacher herself. “She made it look like architecture that would fall down if you did it wrong.” Molly believed that the careful dissection of a sentence was a lofty exercise, one that could teach a student the intricacies of not only parts of speech but of thought itself. Over the years, generations of Milton girls had been called up to the blackboard by Miss Pundy and instructed to mark the subject, the verb, the predicate, and the object complement. With the eyes of their classmates concentrated on their backs, they drew their tidy diagrams in white chalk, lines extending in every direction.
True, grammar was the bane of countless students who wished they could just read a sentence instead of having to spend what felt like half their lives separating appositives from gerunds and hortatory subjunctives. But it is worth noting that sentence diagramming was once extremely popular as a pedagogic tool. It was beloved by, of all people, Gertrude Stein, and Molly Punderson might have
agreed with Stein’s assertion that, “I myself do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.”6
This, then, was Molly’s great aspiration: to have her name perpetuated in the vast unseeable future not by a line of Punderson descendants, but by a single book. A grammar she had yet to write.
For most of her teaching career, Molly lived with Dorothy Kendall, a history teacher with a sharp tongue who has been described by her students as a “violent presence.”7 No sooner had the girls in her class raised their hands and prepared to speak than Miss Kendall would admonish them, “Be brief!” Dorothy was older than Molly and in the decade after she retired she was listed in the Stockbridge phone book as a resident of Molly’s cottage, Topside.8
They had much in common, Molly and Dorothy, two natives of Massachusetts who enjoyed books and travel. They were both athletic and gifted at tennis and horseback riding. Neither woman, apparently, ever had a grand romance with a man; neither woman was known to have been courted by even a second-rate suitor. All this raises the question of whether they were lovers. Simply answered, there is no way to know. They had a “Boston marriage,” in the style of many women of their era whose intellectualism and professionalism were an obstacle to marriage.
Molly was looking forward to having the time, in her unhurried retirement, to complete her grammar. The sooner she finished it, she believed, the happier she would be. “Time (and quiet) have been alarmingly hard to come by,” she wrote to her former student, Kate More, seven months into her retirement, “but I’ve tentatively finished and typed a few opening chapters for the grammar and am sending you a copy.”
Still, the months of her retirement passed and the grammar remained unfinished. The days seem to blend into one another as she busied herself with other projects. She taught a class at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, entertained her friends from Milton, and renovated her kitchen. She went to the beauty parlor for permanents. She wrote college recommendations for her former students and chatty letters to female friends in which she proved to be a rather precise observer of the weather (“It’s like a bad April, not a bad June,” she wrote one June.) When she read fiction, it was mainly at mealtimes, because “after dinner, I’m sorry to say, I simply can’t keep awake—an awful blight.”
* * *
In her retirement, Molly ended her friendship with Dorothy Kendall and took to spending time with her best friend from childhood, Helen Rice, a violinist who had retired as head of the music department at the Brearley School in Manhattan in 1950. She was known in classical music circles as the founder of the Amateur Chamber Music Players, and divided her time between her apartment in Manhattan and her house in Stockbridge—Rood Cottage, as it was known. It had been built by her grandfather, Ogden Rood, a professor of physics and expert on color theory whose writings were cited admiringly by Georges Seurat and may have helped shape the advent of pointillism.
Although Molly claimed to be “very ignorant in music,” she would often accompany Helen to Tanglewood and listen appreciatively as her friend lauded or damned the latest efforts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at its summer home. The two women also liked a certain playhouse in Pittsfield, where, during the season, the plays changed every week. They preferred going later in the week, when the actors knew their lines better.
Helen was startled one day when Molly woke her up at dawn. “Molly had a key to my house,” she explained, “and she came up one morning and said she had something to say to me.” Helen assumed it was something about the ceremony for a new greenhouse at the Berkshire Garden Center, which would be named after her mother; Molly had offered to make remarks. “But when I came downstairs and sat down on the sofa, she looked at me with those blue eyes of hers, and said, ‘Don’t you know what I am going to say?’
“No,” Helen said.
And then Molly said it. I am going to marry Norman Rockwell. Helen later recalled her reaction as something close to shock. “I was so taken by surprise that I heard myself saying, ‘Noooo,’” she said. “And then I pulled myself together quickly and said, ‘I hope you are going to be very happy.’ But it really did take me by surprise, because I had only seen them together once.”9
Indeed, everyone in Stockbridge was incredulous when they heard. It seemed to defy reason. They had known Molly forever and thought of her as a sober, grounded woman not built for the fluttery ways of romance. They could not remember her without white hair.
* * *
Rockwell wondered how best to break his news to Peggy Best. On September 28, one day before his wedding announcement appeared in the local paper, he wrote to her as frankly as he could. “Dear Peggy,” he began, “Since we are such good friends, I just don’t want the news to reach you secondhand. Molly Punderson and I are engaged to be married.” He signed off, perhaps because of nerves, with a nonword: “Affectionally, Norman.”
Peggy was startled by his news. “Molly was the complete opposite of my mother,” recalled her son, Jonathan Best. “Once the dust settled, they all went back to being good friends, but on a different level. My mother made one uncharacteristically catty joke about the marriage. She would say, ‘As far as Norman and Molly’s marriage is concerned, my imagination stops at the bedroom door.’”10
When Molly hinted to Rockwell that she wanted an engagement ring, he urged her to buy one for herself. On the Wednesday before their wedding, she called Rockwell from Parenti Sisters, a jewelry shop on Newbury Street in Boston, to say she had found the most stunning ring—a blue sapphire with a small marquise diamond on each side. When she lamented that the price, $1,800, was too high, Rockwell insisted that she splurge.11
Norman and Molly Rockwell, photographed in 1962 by his assistant Bill Scovill
They were married on a crisp fall day, October 25, 1961, a Wednesday, at 2:30 in the afternoon, at St. Paul’s Church in Stockbridge. Molly was given in marriage by her brother, Frank. Her childhood friend Helen Rice was her maid of honor (“really, there was nobody there,” Helen later recalled). Rockwell tapped as his best man Harry Dwight, his friend from the Marching and Chowder Society. Afterward, a reception was held around the corner, at Honeysuckle Hill, the home of Miss Alice B. Riggs, whose father had founded the Austen Riggs Center and who spent her adulthood breeding German shepherds. “When the couple return from a four-week trip to Hollywood, they will live in Mr. Rockwell’s home on South Street,” it was reported in The Berkshire Eagle. And so Molly Rockwell, much like Mary Rockwell some three decades earlier, began her one and only marriage in a house that another wife had furnished and that reflected another woman’s taste.
* * *
It was, in fact, a working honeymoon. It began in New York City, two days at the Plaza Hotel that were devoted to the not exactly romantic endeavor of granting interviews and garnering publicity for his latest book. The Norman Rockwell Album was an oversize compendium of color reproductions intended as the pictorial companion to his autobiography and similarly published by Doubleday. To help promote it, Rockwell did a taped interview that would run shortly before Christmas, on NBC’s Update, a news program for high school students. Dressed in his customary tweed jacket and bow tie, (unlit) pipe in hand, Rockwell gamely took questions from a high school student, Betsy Thresher of Montclair, New Jersey, who looked the part with her blond bangs, high ponytail and plaid jumper.12
To what degree, she asked Rockwell in a whispery voice, does a person’s face reflect his or her character?
“I think it is mostly in the eyes and the mouth,” he replied. “After all, the nose doesn’t make a big difference.”
Before the segment ended, he unfolded a large reproduction of The Golden Rule and joked, “I just happen to have my violin with me.”
The next day, October 27, after granting an early-morning interview to Frank Blair of the Today show, Rockwell flew off to California with his bride. The trip began in San Francisco, where they visited his son Jarvis. Then it was down to Los Angeles, where “he will spend the next f
ew weeks completing a series of assignments,” as a paper reported.13 The honeymoon was similar to his previous honeymoon, a reversion of sorts, awakening in him what appeared to be a fear of being alone with his wife, of losing the camaraderie of his male friends. He had so much trouble with all of it, the stuff that was not his art.
“I am getting married to Mollie Punderson on the 25th and am coming out to California soon after,” Rockwell had written to Clyde Forsythe.14 “Mollie and I are coming to see you two but we’ll give you fair warning. Love, Norman.” That was the whole letter.
By then Forsythe was in his midseventies and suffering from various ailments. Rockwell ended up spending his honeymoon chumming around with a much-younger artist, Joe Mugnaini, whom he had befriended during his semester as a resident artist at the Otis Art Institute a decade earlier. Mugnaini had since become head of the Otis drawing department. Rockwell happily worked out of his friend’s studio. He even sat in on a few classes, “working with plastics and learning about modern techniques,” as a local paper reported.
“Norman was very playful with my dad,” recalled Diana Mugnaini, who was then in high school. “He was with our family all the time.”15 On Thanksgiving he joined them for dinner at a restaurant in Los Angeles, the Captain’s Table. There was always a part of him that preferred other people’s families to his own.
* * *
Mary Leete Punderson, once she became Molly Rockwell, found satisfaction in her new identity. In a letter written to a former student, Kate More, after she returned from California, she confided: “I wanted to write to you, particularly, because I had a feeling I could make you understand, more than anyone else, how really wonderful this marriage is … As the initial slight stiffness and strangeness wears away, the real marvel of it all is sometimes overwhelming. Norman is an extraordinary person.”
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 38