Woman of Valor (55 page)

 

Coming of age had not been easy for Stuart Sanger, whose will was all but shattered by the early years of the Depression. Chastened by his hard luck on Wall Street, he finally straightened himself out professionally by following Grant to Cornell Medical School. Even as an intern at New York's Bellevue Hospital, however, he remained prone to intense emotional outbursts and occasional bouts with alcohol. Still living on money from his mother and stepfather as he neared the age of forty, he observed wryly that by the time he finished he would be able to claim old age insurance “so that the future does not seem entirely dark.” The dependency nevertheless bred resentment and confusion, and on occasion he tried to explain himself to his mother, but she never seemed to have the time or inclination to listen.
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Like so many young men of this generation, the prospect of being drafted forced Stuart to make commitments and assume personal responsibilities he had long deferred. While training at the Leahy Clinic in 1941, he began dating Virginia Barbara Peabody, a young nurse from New Hampshire, twelve years his junior, who was also on the staff there. They were secretly married and in quick succession had two children: Margaret, born in November of 1941, six months after the wedding, and Barbara Nancy, born nineteen months later, only days after Noah's death—the first named for her illustrious grandmother, the second, for her mother and great-aunt, two quiet but stalwart women.

Relations between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law were strained from the outset. Margaret was never terribly good at disguising the fact that she found her daughter-in-law Barbara plain and uninspiring and resented what she considered as her slavish attention to family and household responsibilities. The two women could not have been more different in temperament and were never close. But a mutual respect developed between them, especially as the one grew older and increasingly dependent on the other for practical care.

The distance between them also never interfered with the warmth Margaret demonstrated toward her two spirited granddaughters, whose company in Tucson during and after the war provided her joyful companionship. Margaret lavished the time on these two little girls that she had long ago denied their father and frequently lamented that he was missing from their young childhood, as though she had never once been absent from his own. They called her Mimi (because when they were little she always said, “Come to me, Come to me”) and quickly learned that, although she couldn't really be depended on to care for them in any responsible or sustained way, she possessed a very special gift. Whenever they were together, she made them feel as though they were the most important two people in the world. In their memory, she remains very much the “grande dame”—often distracted by worldly interests that seemed distant and unimportant to them, but able to charm and captivate as no one else could, whenever she took the time.
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By contrast to Stuart, Grant Sanger advanced with considerable ease during the difficult years of the Depression and as a consequence enjoyed more cordial relations with his mother. He shared her enthusiasm for birth control, her interest in politics and public policy, and her keen sense of humor. Once he earned his medical degree, however, they took opposing views on the wisdom of promoting public health programs that included contraception. Like most of his colleagues, Grant feared that government intervention would compromise his professional autonomy and income. In 1939, he wrote a friend at the AMA, suggesting that the organization write birth control into a pending public health bill as a sure way of seeing that it was defeated. “My sons, My sons!” Margaret exclaimed in a penciled comment on her copy of the correspondence.

Grant met his future wife, Margery Edwina Campbell, while they were both residents at Columbia Presbyterian. Tall, dark, and attractive, Edwina, as she was called, embodied all the qualities Margaret ostensibly admired and wished for in a daughter-in-law. The bright and determined daughter of a wealthy, established family, she'd graduated from Vassar in 1932, a year ahead of Mary McCarthy, with the intention of combining a family and a career. Grant seemed very much in love, and Margaret was pleased when they married after a brief courtship in 1939.

“You welcomed me very graciously into your family,” Edwina wrote. “I have a feeling that we shall be good friends, and I hope that you will come to think of me as a daughter, and not as that anomolous creature—a daughter-in-law!” Thrilled with the furnishings Margaret provided as a wedding gift, she wrote again with enthusiastic thanks to “Mummy Sanger” about the charms of the new apartment she and Grant had found on Park Avenue and about their busy schedules at the hospital.

The future seemed unbounded in its promise for the young couple, until the war quickly altered their plans. Two sons, Michael and Peter, were born before Grant went overseas, and Margaret visited them occasionally at the navy base in Coronado, California, which became their home during the war, doting over the boys, amazed by how much the one's plaintive sensitivity and the other's physical prowess resembled the same contrast between Grant and Stuart. These children called her Domah, the term of endearment that Grant and Peggy had long ago invented for Bill Sanger's mother.
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For the final two years of the war, Margaret remained in Tucson, her ear tuned to the radio. The harsh realities of combat hit her especially hard one day when she crossed paths at the local station with a trainload of young German prisoners en route to a detention facility in Mesa, Arizona. Mostly, she just waited quietly for letters from her sons, while admiring the hope and courage of their wives, especially at holidays. She learned to drive a car—though never with sufficient attention to who else was on the road, according to Stuart—and she could often be seen on errands around town, sporting a broad-brimmed straw hat to shield her delicate skin from the harsh sun, along with white cotton gloves to protect her hands. She lavished affection on a lovely, raven cocker spaniel called Beauty, and she attended an Episcopal Church regularly, for the first time in many years—amusing herself with a steady stream of friends, including the minister and his wife, who stopped by the house for drinks or dinner and kept her company on such momentous occasions as Roosevelt's 1944 election victory. Saddened by the President's sudden death the following April, and concerned for its potential effect on Allied morale, she was nonetheless annoyed by the three days of treacly tribute that played without interruption on the radio. She would not forgive Roosevelt his weaknesses, even in death.

A visit from Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Nehru's sister and later his official representative to the United Nations, provided temporary diversion in the several weeks following. The two women had met in India in 1936, when Madame Pandit started a birth control clinic in a provincial Indian hospital. In Tucson, Margaret gave a garden party in her honor and then prepared to leave for Willowlake. A long and languid summer followed before the dropping of the first atomic bombs in August, and Japan's subsequent surrender.

Grant returned to California on Thanksgiving Day, but he was off to New York almost immediately to begin the difficult job of reestablishing his medical career. Margaret would not let herself relax until Christmas Day, when Stuart had also returned, and both boys gathered together in Arizona with their new families for the happiest holiday she ever thought it possible to enjoy. To celebrate, she distributed several thousand dollars worth of shares from her portfolio of stocks, so they would have something from her with which to begin a new life.
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The pace of postwar adjustment was nevertheless rapid and confusing. Grant and Edwina found an apartment on New York's newly fashionable East End Avenue and tried to juggle jobs and family. A poignant letter to his mother describes the young soldier's conflicted emotions on trading the security of his uniform for the uncertainty of a civilian future. Two more sons, Stephen and Alexander, were born, but Grant was still eager for a daughter to fill the void left by Peggy's death. A fifth son, Morgan, came along first, and then with bittersweet success, their daughter, Anne, was born. Margaret “blushed,” by her own account, whenever she had to acknowledge the size of Grant and Edwina's family, but she seemed willing to condone it on the grounds that they could at least support a large family. She even cashed in more of her stock and made them a loan to build a house in Mt. Kisco, New York, that was large enough for everyone to fit. Assured that there would also be a room “for her old age,” she chose to remain in Tucson and kept in touch through a ritual phone call every Sunday night. After selling Willowlake in 1946, she did spend some time each summer at Grant's house on Fishers Island in Long Island Sound, but generally showed up with the intention of staying a month and then found some reason to leave early, though never without first playing endless card games, where she endeared herself to the children by letting them cheat and pretending she didn't notice.

It was Stuart who remained in Tucson, built himself a successful practice in internal medicine, and wound up taking care of his mother. He and Barbara built a house on a piece of property just several blocks away from hers, which Noah had wisely purchased before his death. They saw each other every Sunday for lunch, and became devoted fans of the dishes prepared by Margaret's Mexican help. Sometimes Margaret did the cooking herself, experimenting with exotic cuisines like Indian curries, which the children did not always appreciate. But she redeemed herself afterward by having them stage an elaborate play of their own invention, complete with costumes and props gathered from her many travels all over the world. She was always the director, and children from all over the neighborhood participated, with their parents gathered in her living room to watch.
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Beyond family, Margaret was drawn during these years to a circle of artistically inclined refugees from the East, who like her had settled in Tucson because of its natural beauty and easy climate. Leigh-ton and Catherine Rollins, two carefree retirees from Massachusetts, became favorite friends whose small theatrical ventures she helped finance in what would become a careless pattern of generosity to favorite companions and causes that Stuart and Barbara found especially unsettling. Through them and Dorothy McNamee, the owner of a local bookstore, she also met a young and commercially successful landscape painter by the name of Hobson Pittman. Though twenty-one years younger than she, Pittman was attracted by what he once called Margaret's “exuberant gaiety,” and they began a casual love affair that lasted for six years and included many romantic weekends back East and to Europe. Pittman was witty, charming, and childishly devoted, and much to the chagrin of friends who were shocked by the disparity of age, Margaret kept up the relationship. Surviving letters profess a lighthearted love, but never anything too serious. There is one confession to Dorothy Brush that Hobson was fun to know, “but not for keeps.” Another to Anne Kennedy, who'd remained a loyal correspondent since the early days at the American Birth Control League, confesses that, although some sort of “permanent companionship” might be possible, it was hardly worth the press it would invite. Brush, who had left her second husband, Alexander Dick, and was torturing herself over a married man, marveled at the ease with which Margaret began and ended affairs, and the freedom she extended to all of her lovers.

The two unattached women traveled extensively together during these years. They spent one long winter holiday together in Tucson, another in Haiti, and vacationed during the summer at Dorothy's ocean-front estate in Bridgehampton, New York, where they were sometimes joined by Juliet Rublee.

“They said that David & Jonathan had a love ‘passing the love of women,'” Dorothy wrote Margaret after one such expedition. “Well I love you passing the love of men, I really do…no one has ever understood me as well as you do, or been as dear & patient & kind & considerate & thoughtful.” Margaret's affections were no less genuine, but the friendship became even more valuable to her when Dorothy's easy access to money financed one last venture for birth control.
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Eager to be back in the public eye, Margaret had hosted a well-publicized cocktail reception for Eleanor Roosevelt when the former First Lady visited Tucson in March of 1946. Two months later, she was back in the papers again when she made a two-week cross-country tour of family planning clinics. Despite the favorable press, the trip left her despondent over the inadequacies of the diaphragm regimen. Millions of women were still in need of what she identified with great prescience, in a letter to Robert Dickinson, as a “birth control pill.” Convinced that Planned Parenthood, more than ever before, was reaching only the middle classes, she rallied a group of supporters to petition the national organization's board to endow a fund that would be maintained for the sole purpose of research into simpler and cheaper methods.

Seasoned old-timers like Dickinson and Clarence Gamble shared her concern and echoed her cry, but they too had vastly reduced the scale of their own birth control activities during the war and enjoyed little credibility with the younger professionals at the organization's helm in New York, who were pressed for money just to maintain the status quo and, for the time being at least, advocated only token action on any new initiatives. Several years later, Planned Parenthood would enlist the National Research Council as a credible scientific sponsor of contraceptive research in the hope of raising funds from foundations unwilling to support mere activists, but the project would never get off the ground.
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Finding little reward in fighting the bureaucracy in New York, Margaret decided to take herself abroad, where opportunities for fresh approaches seemed more promising. She left for Europe in August of 1946, with Dorothy and Abraham Stone in tow, the occasion being a family planning conference convened in Stockholm by Elise Ottesen-Jensen, the Swedish pioneer in sex education and contraception, who had been in Zurich in 1930. The assembly called attention to the need for controlled population growth in light of the still precarious state of the postwar economy in Europe and formed a committee to work toward the establishment of a permanent international organization, whose leadership Margaret was not about to cede without a contest. Ottesen-Jensen, the seventeenth child of a Protestant minister, had a reputation as a formidable reformer in her own country, but she was no match for Margaret outside of it.