Memory, Grief, Three O'clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 26

In the Ukraine at some unknown place

May 13, 3.07 a.m.

Pretty much every conversation I have in the store right now, whether with a shopper or a colleague, is a variation on the theme of “Have you ever seen such a miserable May?” If I have, I can’t remember one: this month’s performance is proudly sponsored by the firm of Chilly, Soggy, and Somber, Dashers of Vernal Hope Since 1917.

Something spooky came my way via the weather, at least. This was two days back, Wednesday, mid-afternoon. I got home from work, tired, worn, gathered up the various packages at my door, three all told, kindly conveyed by second-hand book dealers scattered hither and yon. I brought them in, set them down, gave the kettle its instructions, and then cranked up the heat as far as it would go: absurd to be doing so this far into the spring, but that’s how damn cold it was in the apartment.

The radiator complained and the kettle chugged and I applied myself to examining my purchases: this, after all, is why I work. Among the new arrivals was a whacking great — 450 pp — volume of Antaeus, the literary magazine founded by Paul Bowles and Daniel Halpern. This was No. 61, from Autumn of ’88. The uniting theme is “Journals, Notebooks, & Diaries.” I was glad. I’d been waiting for it a long while, was wondering if it had gone astray in the mail. (Parenthetically — he wrote, stupidly, have established the parenthetical fact with a tell-tale diacritical — I’ll add here that the post, contrary to legend, is amazingly reliable, at least in my experience. I live a bock west of my last apartment and the letter carrier who delivers here — he calls himself a mailman, by the way — was the letter carrier who delivered there. He’s so vigilant and on the mark that anything that might be sent in error to my previous address is caught and redirected. Amazing, really. It’s a relationship I cherish. Just to keep it fresh and ensure he’s engaged I sometimes ask friends travelling abroad to send me letters with return addresses like “Buckingham Palace,” and “Palace of Versailles,” and “The Vatican,” prominently marked.)

I took my tea, and my copy of Antaeus and arranged myself odalisque-style on the couch. I opened it to Mavis Gallant’s (MG) contribution: “French Journal,” it’s called. These are diary entries made during the spring and summer of 1987, when the Klaus Barbie trial was underway. She followed it closely; it’s the theme that links that 10 or so entries. Bear in mind that I was thus engaged on an aberrantly cold day in May, having just turned up the heat. The first thing I read was:

Wednesday, May 6

Cold spring. The heating in my apartment building has been turned on, after a bitter and argumentative vote, and much conspiring in hallways and in the elevator. All foreigners vote for heating and being comfortable, and hang the cost. The richest occupants, with the largest amount of floor space, for for sore throats and influenza. Some write the number of square meters they own next to their name, in the “No” column of the voting list, stuck to the concierge’s door. An unknown hand scratches the figures out. My neighbour, aged Mme D,, wears a long woollen scarf and is quietly freezing, waiting for the heating to take effect. She wants me to vote about a different matter, or, at least, give a written opinion. A majority of occupants wish to sack the concierge — a poor muddled woman with nowhere else to go, and no hope of finding another job or roof. Americans in the building (three) seem revolted by the plan to evict the concierge. “She delivers the mail and takes out the garbage. What more do they want?” Told that she is accused of not giving “service,” and that the halls and stairs are very dirty, they look puzzled. “Service” vanished from the American vocabulary a long time ago.

I thought, “Oh, MG. You trickster, you. Your cold Wednesday in May delivered to my cold Wednesday in May, a mere 35 years after the fact. Arrival is arrival. Time is not always material.” Then I fell asleep. When I woke the room was warm. The tea was cold.

My parents were married on this day, in Winnipeg, in 1950, the year of the great mid-century flood. I grew up hearing stories about how my father had been sandbagging on the banks of the Red on the morning of the wedding, of how there was a last minute change of church because the rising waters had cut off the intended one, of all the scrambling that entailed, of how when they got on the plane — the first flight either of them had taken — bound for Minneapolis and their honeymoon — my grandfather was traveling with them, which must have been a panic — they looked down on what should have been brown prairie and it looked like a sea. In the basement of our house hung my father’s hip waders, his flood drag. Spiders spun their webs between them. Dust lay thick. They were never taken down or tried on in any game of dress-up. About the hip waders there was something sacred. This was never made explicit. It was simply known.

They were married 52 years; their union ended when my mother ended. There were tensions between them — of course there would have been — but I never saw them fight. Nor, come to that, were they given to public displays of affection. The only time I ever saw them hold hands was at my brother’s funeral; dead at 39. There must have been times when one or the other thought of cutting bait, of getting out, but they persevered. Raised by Victorians, they were themselves Victorians. It was what you did. It was what was expected. It meant the centre held. They weren’t wrong. I’m a Victorian, too, it turns out.

This is all distraction, however. I promised that I’d finish off the story of Mildred Wood, the fiction editor at The New Yorker who gave MG her big break. Mildred came from a warm but, I think, conventional family. Her mother, also Mildred, died in 1919; her father, Augustus, never remarried. Mildred allied herself with Richardson King Wood, a boy whose sister was a student at her school; the Woods came from a broken home. The family had piles of dough — “Penllyn House,” their estate in the pretty and privileged village of Ardsley on Hudson, was featured in the May 1909 edition of American Homes and Gardens — and there was lots of travel and jazz age indulgence.

If you inhabited a certain circle, divorce was no longer stigmatizing, a cause for shunning. All the best people were doing it. What year Arthur King Wood and Marguerite Richardson Wood went their separate ways, I can’t say. But on December 6, 1927, in The New York Times appeared this announcement.

Nothing stirred the blood of American socialites of the time like the forging of a trans-Atlantic dynasty with titled Europeans. Pride rises from this short notice like heat waves from a radiator on a cold May afternoon. A solider! A diplomat! A companion of Lawrence of Arabia! Stick a feather in your cap and call it macaroni! It’s peculiar that Marguerite lays claim to only two children, that Richardson King Wood, her first-born, isn’t mentioned. Presumably this is journalistic more than maternal oversight. Not to worry. Here comes the sun, and his moment in it. The very next day, December 7, in the Times, tragic, unbelievable news. You might want to avail yourself of a magnifier…

I hope and pray the day will come when I will write a sentence as felicitous, as unimpeachable as “At any rate it was in the Ukraine at some unknown place that he died, according to a report received by a British service in London from a faithful old Hindoo retainer of the dead man.” You can sense how, as the details start to emerge, the family is scrambling, grabbing at any bucket to bail with. Marguerite can’t be found, her father cites the case of whooping cough that kept him expectorating in Rye. To whom can the journalists turn? Certainly not to Barbara K. Wood, studying hard at Miss Masters School, along with Mildred Burgwin, the future Mrs. Richard King Wood, to say nothing of the eventual path-layer for our girl MG. No. There is but one possibility, he who was not named, the eldest son. He must save the day.

Well, when you put it like that, it all starts to seem so plausible. OF COURSE he was only known as a number! That’s how it works in these situations when you engage in espionage in countries where you have no business being with your brother and your faithful Hindoo retainer. One wonders, of course, at what stage of development the budding relationship between Richardson and Mildred might have been when all this was going on. Vestigial? In the bud? Had promises been exchanged? I think it’s to Mildred’s credit that she didn’t stop taking his calls and start to stake out prospects back home in Pittsburgh. She must have thought, “My, oh my! This is going to be more interesting than ever I imagined.”

The Times, December 9, 1927:

And after this, a veil is drawn. Silence falls. Other concerns surge to the fore. The news cycle in 1927 was much the same as it is now. The question is, of course, did Marguerite simply make it all up, perhaps with the assistance of a few romance novels and maybe a correspondence course on crafting a scenario for silent films. Was it an attention-getting device? If so, why would she want attention? Was she looking to attract notice to herself, or deflect it from someone else? Here’s another notice in the Times from December 23, 1924.

I wonder if Mildred, who would become a nurse before she became a fiction editor, and who must have been a keen student of character, and possibly a connoisseur of neurosis, wondered, as do I, if just possibly Marguerite might have fabricated the elaborate and unlikely tale of Sir Donald in order to pre-emptively take the wind from her ex-husband’s sails? It’s not the least likely story you’ve seen laid out here this morning. In June of 1928, Marguerite had what I think was the last word.

She got on with things. She took to writing, and writing rather well, as here, in Radio Digest, November, 1931.

Here’s the link if you care to read further, and I recommend you do:

https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Radio-Digest/1931/Radio-Digest-1931-11.pdf

At the same time she was recalling her girlhood and her coming out party and so on, she was becoming friendly with a country squire and prosperous livestock breeder named George Howard Davison. He divorced his wife of 35 years in December of 1931 and he and Marguerite were married on Christmas Day. He died in 1936. Marguerite died in New York, January 19, 1943, after a long illness. She was 60.

She had two sisters — she speaks of them in her Radio Digest article. Marguerite, the first to die, was the baby. I think Lena must have been the eldest. She married well, George Arents, who made a fortune by automating the production of cigars. He was a big supporter of the arts, of libraries most especially. When Lena died, in 1956, he commissioned a $150,000 pipe organ in her honour that was installed in St. Thomas’s Church, on Fifth Avenue, in NYC.

It has since been decommissioned, which is quite a business, as it turns out. Have a gander:

https://www.saintthomaschurch.org/2016/12/03/decommissioning-the-arents-memorial-organ/

Marion Richardson, I’m guessing, was the middle child, the bohemian. She never married, and died on December 14, 1952. She was misnamed in her obituary as Marion Robinson. Her profession was given as Artist. She was a fine printmaker, as it turns out, and a painter. This is her work.

She must have spent summers in Quebec, in Murray Bay; it’s noted in her obituary that she donated work to St. Anne’s Church there. One wonders if ever she met up with a precocious little girl from Montreal whose parents would take her into the country, a child who spoke French as well as she spoke English, one who adored her father; he was a painter, too, and might have had involved conversations about the craft with Marion Richardson, visiting from New York. An unusual child. Attentive, eerily so. Listening. Paying close heed. A little pitcher. Wise beyond her years. One to watch out for, that was for sure. And watch out for Mavis was exactly what Mildred, Marion’s eventual kin by marriage, would do. Mildred, the editor. She’s looking over my shoulder now. She’s saying, “Windy. Undisciplined. Poorly reasoned. Too long by half. Stop. Just stop.” Which I will, with my thanks for reading, xo, B