In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown(16)

Browsy

Lump of a bee

Rumbly

Tumbly

Bumbly bee.

Where are you taking

Your golden plunder

Humming along

Like baby thunder?

Over the clover

And over the hay

Then over the apple trees

Zoom away

BUMBLE BEE


Every seat in the auditorium was taken, but people continued to file in. Gertrude Stein had requested that only five hundred tickets be sold to the lecture, but it appeared the struggling Brooklyn Academy of Music was reluctant to turn patrons away. Chairs lined the aisles, and people perched where they could in the slivers of space that remained.

The audience was primarily comprised of women, although Stein’s arrival in America had been widely heralded to all. Newspaper headlines and an electric sign in Times Square welcomed the famous author home from her self-imposed exile in France. The academy was her first stop on a thirty-seven-city lecture tour. A radio interview, the only one she had ever given, had been broadcast two weeks earlier from NBC’s studio. Margaret and another Hollins alumna listened to the broadcast at Margaret’s Greenwich Village apartment. They shared an admiration for Stein’s work while at Hollins, unlike most of the girls at the school who found the writer’s work perplexing. Stein’s repetitious style was meant to evoke clarity, but her use of minimal punctuation frustrated many American readers. In the interview, Stein claimed that punctuation crippled deep understanding of the written word. Margaret wanted to take colored chalk and write that theory all over the blackboard of the professor who had made her repeat freshman English.

Both of the girls were living in New York and attempting to write for a living. Neither was succeeding. Her friend had sold only one poem, and Margaret hadn’t sold a single piece. Her work as a nanny and shopgirl didn’t cover her living expenses, but an allowance from her father gave her a comfortable enough life. Her apartment didn’t have hot water, but she always had enough money to dine out, see plays, and attend lectures like the three that Stein was to give at the academy.

Newspaper reporters took pleasure in taunting Stein’s style in their pun-riddled copy, but the author’s celebrity status and carefully orchestrated interviews drew enormous crowds to her events. Her first lecture was about her most recent book, The Making of Americans. In the semiautobiographical novel, Stein chronicled three generations of a family. She described how the characters’ personalities were formed by their choice to repeat the actions of their parents. Those repetitions shaped their own lives and the lives of their children. Like wave after wave, each generation was formed by the previous generation, which created a collective family culture. The next generation had the choice to carry on the family’s culture or break away. Breaking away was difficult because it fragmented the family.

Margaret had been deeply moved by Stein’s book. It clarified for her why her own family was so broken. Her parents’ individual personalities had been formed long before they met and were influenced by their very different families. They once loved each other enough to overlook those differences, but now her father lived on his boat and her mother was alone in the house on Long Island. There were no plans for family gatherings on Thanksgiving or Christmas. Even so, Margaret missed the structure of holiday breaks that had been a part of her college life. She also missed her friends from Hollins. The summer after she graduated, she served as a bridesmaid in four weddings, but as each friend left the church on the arm of her new husband, Margaret knew the couple was walking off into a life that eventually left her behind. The things she and her now married girlfriends once had in common would erode, especially when children came along. Before long, Margaret knew the letters that bridged her and her friends’ distance would cease and they would lose touch completely.

She tried not to think too hard about the future and kept herself busy. There was always something to do in the city. She visited museums and took classes at The Art Students League of New York. Her instructor had her paint only color with no shape or intention so she could understand the moods colors could evoke. Then she molded forms with clay to get a feel for dimension. After days of that, she painted still lifes and nude model after nude model. This soon bored her. She decided to save money by quitting the class and painting her own pile of fruits and vegetables.

After that, she took a short story course at Columbia University, where Basil Rauch, her new brother-in-law, was earning his doctorate in history. Basil was far too serious for Margaret’s taste, but he suited her docile sister. Basil and Roberta lived close by, and the sisters had become closer in recent months. Margaret teased Basil about his somber dark brown tweed suits, and he considered it an amusing challenge to find interesting dinner companions for Margaret. A parade of professors, writers, and editors were served at his and Roberta’s table, but Margaret found most of them too gentle and dreary. She had no trouble finding good-looking young men with more money than intellect to accompany her to plays, movies, and restaurants around the city. Inevitably, though, she would cast them off, too. They were fun but unable to hold a decent conversation.

She loved living in the city. At night, she lay in her bed and listened to the city grow so quiet she could hear the click of heels on sidewalks and the shutter of the traffic lights as they changed from red to green. She woke early to write and watch the city come to life. When she walked through her Greenwich Village neighborhood, she chatted with street vendors and shopkeepers around Washington Square Park. She helped the French baker around the corner with his English, and he gave her lessons on the French horn in return. Every week, she bought a bouquet of flowers to liven her tiny apartment. She loved how almost anything could be found in the city. In the depths of winter, she discovered white narcissus for sale in the subway, and for a few cents, she bought the memory of spring.