*
Margaret’s last days of summer were spent alone in the family’s Long Island home. Her mother was with Roberta at Vassar and her father with Gratz at MIT. Margaret had a few days alone to prepare for her departure for the Blue Ridge Mountains of Roanoke, Virginia, where she would be attending Hollins College.
This was the start of a new world for her. Margaret vowed to control her racing mind and lazy body. She believed everyone should develop their God-given talents, and since she was doomed to be an athlete, she refused to be a poor one. She felt sluggish and bothered by the ten pounds she had gained over the summer, so she bicycled, swam, and walked for miles, determined to be fit and healthy by the time she left for school.
She used the quiet hours to read in the family’s large library. The Kelly green of the golf course outside its windows blended smoothly into the same shade of green on the walls in the calm, quiet room. She read a memoir of a nurse in the Great War and wondered if she would have been as courageous in the same circumstances. She also read a biography of Robert E. Lee, then letters of her ancestors who fought with him. She found wrenching letters from her grandfather, who fought on the side of the Union in the Civil War, to his brother, a Confederate officer. She studied the family scrapbooks and read her grandparents’ journals. There was a streak of boldness that coursed through her family’s blood. Rules, one ancestor said, were made for people too afraid to bust them. This inspired Margaret. She, too, had a sweeping style, and conventional thoughts weren’t for her, she decided. She wanted to make her own mark on the world. She was headed to the state her ancestors once called home, and she was going to make herself worthy of her distinguished family.
*
On her last night at home, Margaret took a stroll along the shore and watched the moon rise as the stars slowly appeared in the night sky. Earlier that year, her astronomy teacher had lectured on the formation of the galaxy. His talk had disturbed Margaret deeply. The joy of observing the stars through telescopes, memorizing their names, and spotting the major constellations vanished when the professor gave a visual demonstration of how minute the earth was in comparison to the known universe. Margaret had suddenly felt insignificant. If the earth was a mere drop of water in the vast ocean of the cosmos, then her life must be of little matter, she had thought. She desperately tried to make sense of her place in this unfathomably large world. She became obsessed with looking at the stars. One night, it occurred to her that the stars seemed to have individual personality traits. Some were slow to appear, some emitted a bright steady light, while others twinkled in apparent excitement. Eventually, Margaret stopped calling the stars by their proper names and instead renamed them after people she knew who exhibited those same characteristics.
As she left the beach and returned home on her last night in Long Island, she wasn’t ready to leave summer behind quite yet. She climbed onto her balcony and slept in the light of the moon, underneath the blanket of her friends, the stars.
Five
1929–1932
Rush
Knees
Part of a horse
Own body gone now
Part of the horse
Air comes upward
Up from the chest
Into the wings
Part of the horse
Breath suspended
Part of the horse
Gather
Sail away
Over
UNPUBLISHED
In her junior year at Hollins, Margaret was chosen for the coveted role of Mary in the annual Christmas pageant. It was commonly known that being chosen to play the Madonna was akin to a beauty contest at the school. The casting was turned over to the whole student body, who could vote for any girl to fill the part of Mary whether or not she was part of the drama club. Margaret was an active member of that club, though, so she felt confident stepping onto the stage as the pregnant Mary. The play was written by another student and the role of Joseph assigned to a fellow classmate. At the all-girls’ school, it was common for girls to play the male roles onstage and even at the spring cotillion at which many of the girls dressed in men’s tuxedos and donned fake mustaches. Others dressed in formal gowns and were escorted by their “dates” to the dance.
As Mary, Margaret wore a shapeless white dress. Her locks of blond hair were left loose, and a silky blue scarf was pinned at the top of her head. In the play, a young girl happens into conversation with Mary outside the walls of Bethlehem as Joseph seeks shelter for them for the night. The girl is in despair and seeks meaning in life. Mary consoles her, and in exchange, the girl offers her stable as a place for the expectant couple to rest. With her fair complexion, Margaret resembled the Virgin Mary only in pious expression, but her performance was very well received.
Margaret thrived on the social scene at Hollins. In addition to the drama club, she was a student government representative, wing on the hockey team, and charter member of the riding club. On her first visit to Hollins, she had seen some run-down stables on the far side of campus. She convinced the headmistress that an equestrian team, like the one she had belonged to at Dana Hall, would be a desirable addition to the school. Her mother’s sway as an alumna and her father’s checkbook had helped turn the shabby shack into a line of stalls reminiscent of those she’d seen at a Kentucky racetrack.