In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown(7)
Margaret joined the ski and field hockey teams in order to be outside as much as possible. She also found freedom in the library and music salon. Through books and records, she escaped the school’s walls and embarked on adventures in stories and song. She read volume after volume in English and French and made a game of memorizing poems by singing them to her favorite tunes. She sat beside the phonograph, singing along to emotional French ballads in her thin, wavering voice. The passion of the songs moved her, especially one called “The Time of the Cherries,” a ballad written during the Parisian Commune Revolution in 1871. It was a symbolic anthem to the blood spilled during the uprising, as well as to remorse for life unappreciated and nature’s wonder unnoticed.
Margaret was fascinated by the story that inspired the song. It was dedicated to a young ambulance nurse shot during the rebellion. Her white uniform, stained with bright red blood, reminded the songwriter of the splashes of red cherry juice on the streets of Paris. The season of the cherries, typically cherished and celebrated, had come and gone as barricades were built and battles fought. By the time the revolt was over, cherries had blossomed, ripened, and fallen to the ground.
Most likely the song touched Margaret so deeply because she keenly felt the loss of everything she cherished. She had taken her freedom on Long Island for granted. She missed roaming the fields, riding her horse, and playing in the woods. Most of all, she missed her home and family. Their life may not have been perfect; her mother was prone to depression and nagging; her father was away far too frequently. But Margaret missed the times that once seemed so ordinary—evenings around the piano when her mother felt well enough to play and sing, vacations on the coast of Maine, adventures in the woods, and cool mornings spent walking on the golf course with her dog beside her.
Those moments were gone. Now Margaret had to carefully measure the space between her feet and the heels of the shoes marching in front of her. Looking around at the lake or landscape distracted her, and she wanted to go to the library instead of sitting still in the hall and listening to that incessant clock.
*
By the time Maude came to retrieve the girls two years later, Roberta had closed the educational gap between herself and her older sister. Margaret read voraciously but had little interest in other studies. She now, however, harbored a secret desire to be a writer of great literature.
Bruce stayed on in India for another seven months while Maude oversaw the building of the family’s new house in Great Neck on Long Island. Margaret and Roberta attended a private school in the neighborhood until they were able to enter Dana Hall, a boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, about fifteen miles from Boston. To Margaret, the close-knit community of the school felt like a second home. The twelve small cottages and the main building on its campus were bordered by fields of buttercups, timothy, and white violets. The courses, lectures, and assigned readings were challenging, but Margaret enjoyed learning new philosophies and discussing them with friends and teachers. She joined the equestrian team and a sorority and for the first time developed an intimate circle of friends. She grew close to her roommate, Katherine Carpenter, and they gave each other nicknames. Because Margaret’s hair was the same color as the timothy grasses surrounding the school, she was called Tim. Katherine was dubbed Kitty.
Having spent the last two years studying abroad, Margaret had missed many of the rites of passage other girls at Dana Hall participated in, such as coming-out parties. Nevertheless, the effervescent Margaret made friends quickly and pledged a sorority. She was thrilled to have those girls as her sisters, but in order to belong, the strong-willed Margaret had to submit to the older members. Pledges were required to run errands for the seniors and to refer to themselves as “It.” Margaret made their beds, delivered their packages, saved seats for them in chapel, and even tried to sew stripes onto the pants of one senior. She failed miserably at keeping the stripes straight, and after staying up all night trying to correct her handiwork, she was demoted to sewing buttons onto another girl’s coat. Even though she was a failure with a needle, in May, a group of girls blindfolded Margaret and led her to a ceremony where she was welcomed to the sorority.
That same month, Margaret’s mother and father met her in Boston for her birthday. At dinner, they gave her a brown leather diary with her name stamped on the front. On its pages she wove literary allusions, poetry, and quotes that inspired her.
To calm her racing mind or when she became overwhelmed by an experience, she took mental notes of her senses—what she was seeing, tasting, feeling. It seemed to slow time down and let her remember those moments clearly so she could record the details in her diary that night. Without fail, she noted a portion of her day and at the top of each page filled in the designated spaces for documenting the weather and the phase of the moon.
As her first year at Dana Hall was complete, Margaret returned to Long Island, but her stay there was brief. Her mother had been hospitalized with high blood pressure and depression after Margaret’s birthday dinner in Boston. When the girls came home to Long Island for their summer break, Bruce decided it would be better for Maude’s recuperation if he sent Margaret and Roberta to spend three weeks with his family in Kentucky. Although Margaret loved being back on Long Island, where she could swim in the ocean, ride her bike, or walk for miles on the golf course next to their new home, this trip was a welcome respite from the pressure cooker inside the house. After returning from India, Maude had joined the Theosophical Society and frequently attended lectures and séances. She had lost both her sister and father unexpectedly within a year of each other, and this religion strongly appealed to Maude in her grief. Despite her newfound faith, Maude’s bouts of depression had become more severe. She frequently shut herself away in her room for days, shouting commands to her husband and children from the doorway of her room. She demanded that they drop whatever they were doing and immediately attend to her often petty needs. She complained about her husband and constantly corrected her children. This angered Bruce and exhausted Margaret. Rather than divorce Maude, Bruce bought a large boat and docked it nearby. If he needed to escape their circular quarrels, he stayed on board his boat.