One night at a dinner with Walter and his friends, Margaret was invited to go sightseeing in Italy and to stay at a palace in Florence. She was short on funds, but another dinner companion offered to loan her the money needed for the excursion. She traveled to the palace, located along the Arno River. She wrote to her sister that Crispian chased cats all around the palace and that she was very near the pension where they had stayed with their mother before going to Brillantmont.
On the train back to France, Margaret’s side began to ache. She thought it might be an ovarian cyst, something she had experienced before. The pain usually passed after a day, but by the time she arrived at the station in èze, her pain was unbearable. Instead of returning to the Chateau Barlow, she went directly to a hospital in Nice.
She was examined and told to prepare for a possible surgery. Symptoms of an ovarian cyst and appendicitis are similar, and the doctor wanted to wait a day to see if her pain would pass. If not, he would operate in the morning. Margaret hurriedly put things in order. Her checking account was overdrawn, and she had no money to pay the hospital or the man who had loaned her money to travel to Italy. She asked Walter to send her father a telegram asking him to deposit money in her checking account. Bruce Brown, however, didn’t like or trust Walter. He told Margaret he thought the man was a crook. Besides, Bruce also was quite sick—far too ill to go to the bank. Margaret cabled Roberta asking for the money, and her sister sent it right away.
Margaret wrote a codicil to her will naming Pebble her closest of kin and dashed off letters and telegrams to editors and friends. Dr. Daviau performed surgery the next day and found that a cyst was not the issue but that Margaret’s appendix was about to burst. Once it was removed, he placed it in a jar that Margaret kept by her hospital bed. He ordered her to lie still while she recovered.
Margaret knew that staying in bed after surgery wasn’t recommended. Blood clots could form if a patient didn’t get up and move around. She questioned the doctor’s orders and called her physician in America to ask him to intervene. He tried, but to no avail. Even after two more calls to her doctor in the States, the order for absolute bed rest remained. Margaret was irritated but tried to be as friendly as possible with the doctor and hospital staff. Dr. Daviau brought her wine from his own cellar. She also charmed the stereotypically strict nurses to let Crispian in for a short visit. Walter was attentive to her every need and brought her meals from local restaurants. He moved her bed to an open window so she could watch a parade passing by.
The hospital’s nurses were nuns, and their caps with wings extending from either side reminded Margaret of Babar’s adventures. She spent her recuperation time writing letters and working on manuscripts. This health scare had made her all the more eager to begin her new life with Pebble as soon as possible. She dispatched a postcard to Monty Hare, telling him about her appendectomy; other than that, she said, she was having a marvelous time and doing well. In a postscript, she wrote that she was having two boxes of Michael’s papers delivered to him.
On the morning of November 13, Walter arrived at the hospital early in the morning to help move Margaret to his hotel. She would complete her recuperation at Chateau Barlow and then meet Pebble in Panama. He had chosen a location for their wedding on the island of Saint Thomas and set sail to meet her plane.
The nurse came in to prepare Margaret for release and asked how she felt. Margaret pulled back her bedcovers and kicked her leg up can-can style and said, “Grand!” But then, she immediately collapsed. A blood clot that had formed in her leg had broken free and cut off the blood supply to her brain. To the nurse and Walter, it appeared as if Margaret had suffered a stroke. She regained consciousness briefly, but her words were unintelligible.
Walter dashed off telegrams to Pebble and Margaret’s father at 8:15 A.M. to let them know Margaret was seriously ill. He told them she had suffered an embolism but promised to send them an update the next day. Two hours later, though, he issued another telegram to tell them Margaret had died.
The business of an American dying overseas was handled by the American Consulate. Their crisply written telegrams and letters were practiced in sympathy, formality, and efficiency. Walter Varney was willing to accompany Margaret’s remains back to the United States, but funds would have to be wired. The codicil to the will Margaret had written almost two weeks before requested that she be cremated and her ashes spread at her beloved Only House.
The thank-you letter Margaret had written to Roberta for sending her money arrived a few days later. Margaret had promised to pay her sister back in December. She had joked that she was grateful for the money because it meant that if the surgery didn’t go well, at least she wouldn’t die a pauper.
*
Pebble arrived in port expecting to meet Margaret. Instead, he was handed Walter Varney’s telegrams. For almost a month, he stayed on his boat, deep in mourning. He didn’t have the heart to go on with his journey, so he returned to New York. He moved into Cobble Court with plans to stay there until the lease expired.
Dot took care of shuttering the Only House. When Margaret’s possessions arrived from the American Consulate in France, it was Pebble’s mother who sorted Margaret’s clothes and forwarded the gifts Margaret had bought for her friends. On Margaret’s stationery, Pebble wrote a letter to her father, telling him how honored he felt to have loved her and to have been loved by her. He said that Margaret had been a rare individual, the kind that comes along only once in a long, long time. She would never really die because she lived on in him, and through her books, she would live on in many, many other people. The next year, Pebble left Cobble Court. He returned to his boat and the uncomplicated sea.
Epilogue
After Margaret’s death, Bruce Bliven joined a group of Margaret’s friends for a dinner to memorialize her. Her Birdbrain Club, editors from different publishing houses, and beagling club members gathered, but when the dinner was over, Bruce knew they would never gather together again. Margaret had been the architect of the web that connected them; without her, there was little to keep them united.
*
Roberta and Bruce had been named executors of her estate and were suddenly thrown into the middle of Margaret’s copious business affairs. Deadlines and decisions were heaped upon them. Some of Margaret’s collaborators finished songs and books of hers that were in progress, but most of her projects were stalled by the lengthy probate of Margaret’s will. It took almost five years for the courts to sort out the contracts, copyrights, and value of Margaret’s publications. At that time, Goodnight Moon was earning very little per year, so they estimated the value of the book to be $200, and it would be another twenty years before the New York Public Library would add the book to its stacks. At last tally, the book has sold more than forty-eight million copies.