Woman of Valor (34 page)

Whatever he may have suspected about the bonds that tied his wife to these people, he remained secure in the knowledge that no matter how frequent or long her trips to England, she would invariably return to him with her affections intact. Her emotional duplicity in this regard, however, seems undeniable, as is apparent from another letter she wrote to Hugh de Selincourt in 1924. As a wedding gift, Noah had built her a stately but gracious stone house several hours north of New York City in the town of Fishkill. Perched above a mirrorlike pond surrounded by willow trees, it was modeled after the romantic residence at Wantley and given the name “Willowlake.” She wrote of her joy in living there:

 

If by night Margaret had reservations about her second husband, however, she apparently kept them from him. His letters during the early years of their marriage convey the ardor of an adolescent boy discovering the warmth and pleasure of sexual intimacy for the first time. He had married for love and was totally captivated by the wife who, in his eyes, combined attractiveness, gaiety, and charm with intelligence and seriousness of purpose, as no other woman he had ever known. She would only have to appear on the path that led from her study to the main house at Willowlake, Olive Byrne Richard remembers, and her beaming husband would turn to his companions and remark worshipfully, “Isn't she the most beautiful creature in the world?”

The only problem was that, more often than not, Noah found himself alone with just pen and paper to appease the intensity of his newly aroused sexual appetite. In the early years of their marriage, Margaret traveled frequently throughout the United States and Europe. In both 1923 and 1924, she spent several months alone in London, where she achieved renewed celebrity when her
Family Lim
itation
pamphlet was banned from circulation by a London court. (Contraception was legal in England, but the pamphlet was apparently censored because the sexual feelings of women were discussed not far from an illustration of proper diaphragm technique that showed a finger inserted into the vagina.)

During these separations Noah could only write her adoring letters, so filled with longing for her return and with protestations of his intense unhappiness that they began to get on her nerves. “He is such a dear lonely soul. I wonder how he goes on at all with so little within himself,” she confided to Juliet Rublee in 1924, in a rather bleak assessment of the character of the man to whom she was lawfully joined. A year later she wrote again wondering why independent women like the two of them had attracted such “clinging husbands.” And in still a third letter she also wrote of a dream in which a “white woman angel” was pointing her finger at Juliet and shouting “devastatingly cruel”—probably projecting as much misgiving about her own conduct as about her friend's.

The fact is that while Noah had been sexually awakened, he was not by inclination or experience a romantic sort. Nor was he a man of literary bent, as were many of Margaret's other suitors. In letters, expressions of sentiment were often sandwiched in among reports of mundane household matters and of the dental problems, intestinal complaints, and assorted other bodily ailments that increasingly plagued him as he grew older. He had an annoying habit of moving in his letters from the sublime to the absolutely ridiculous, without even the grace of a pause or a transition, and this often got in the way of the feelings he was trying to communicate. On one occasion, he told her that she was his “angel of love”—that he loved her “beyond life itself”—but then immediately reminded her to bring along an enema tube from home when she joined him for a vacation at the Homestead Resort in Hot Springs, Virginia. Requests of this nature were not likely to kindle great sparks of passion.
⁸

However awkward, Noah's letters seem, nonetheless, heartfelt. Margaret's more fluid responses, by contrast, convey remarkably hollow sentiments, which often seem as though they were written more out of a sense of obligation than from genuine affection. Repeated assurances that she desired him, for example, quite clearly pandered to his insecurity in the relationship. This was particularly apparent when they spent their second wedding anniversary apart in 1924. She wrote from London that she missed him deeply and yearned for his embraces, even as she was carrying on again with Wells and had begun a torrid new love affair with Harold Child. “England is nothing without my adorable lover husband. You are a magician to turn my life like this,” she insisted. Yet, a journal entry only several weeks later mentions visits with Wells and describes Child as “so exquisite in his mind and response that it is beyond description to express the feeling he inspires.” Child's steamy letters to her in New York when they parted also suggest that she had been lying outright. Several years later on another London trip, she almost got caught in her charade. In one letter, for example, it appears as though she first hurriedly scribbled: “Dearest Noah—Darling—It is really always lovely to be away from you even one day,” but then discovered her unconscious error and corrected it, for her normally clear script is messy, and reads as though she scratched over the
v
, to make certain it read as an
n
, for the word “lonely.”

Margaret's superior sexual sophistication and experience were part of her allure, and Noah may have been so blinded by his apparent victory in winning her away from other men more illustrious than he that he actually assumed they were all only part of her past. Indeed, she seemed to tantalize him with half-truths in this regard. She openly acknowleged that she partied with de Selincourt and took country jaunts with Child, as though this behavior were all very innocent. From London in 1927, for example, she wrote that she had run into Child, who was still lamenting that he had been spurned “for a millionaire.” She described her “old beau” as a handsome and intelligent man who was “about to be knighted.” “Someday you will meet him and be very flattered that I loved you
best
.
Perhaps
,” she wrote, deliberately teasing and yet obscuring the intent of her qualification.
⁹

 

By day, the marriage certainly flourished. There were, of course, the house in Fishkill and the adjoining apartments on New York's fashionable Gramercy Park, done up by an interior decorator from Wanamaker's. Thereafter the couple moved to a luxury building on lower Fifth Avenue, in the shadow of Mabel Dodge's historic salon. It was walking distance from the cold water flat on 14th Street where Margaret had lived before Noah paid the rent, but the two were worlds apart.

After years of warming herself by a coal stove, she could more than comfortably afford elegant clothes, fur coats, and winter holidays in posh, warm weather resorts. Even more cherished, however, was the money put at her disposal to educate her sons and to pamper other family members and old friends who had been generous to her when she was needy. Stuart, though never much of a student, graduated from the Roxbury School in Connecticut and secured admission to Yale after a year spent with tutors in Europe. Grant transferred from Peddie to the considerably more fashionable Westminster School, and from there went on to Princeton. Margaret was intent that her sons earn the academic credentials she lacked—that they never be made to suffer the slights she believed she had endured because she was not properly schooled. She even taught herself to enjoy Ivy League traditions. When she finally took the time to watch Stuart play in a Yale football game, she proudly carried a bunch of violets to represent the school colors and later entertained his girl-friends from Vassar at her house in nearby Fishkill.

The abrupt change in their economic and social circumstances and personal expectations, however, was not always easy for the Sanger boys to negotiate. Having next to no experience with money for nonessentials, they tended to squander whatever they were given and complained more or less constantly to their mother about never having enough. Stuart acted out some of his worst adolescent confusion and rage with a fair amount of drinking and carousing. He barely made it through Yale. Grant, on the other hand, managed external appearances quite well during these years. He worked hard, was determined to succeed, and always tried to be good-natured and ebullient. Yet he suffered bouts of introspection and brooding, which belied this superficial calm.

Margaret, in turn, tried to be patient and on occasion evidenced some degree of understanding of the toll her sons paid for having her as their mother: “We radical parents must stand by our children when they give out what we have fed them in the past,” she once admitted in a letter to Havelock Ellis. “It's conflicting nevertheless to have the radical utterances consistent with the conservative education.” Yet her boys' occasionally rebellious behavior was hardly a manifestation of radicalism but instead revealed their increasing deference to traditional values. In 1927, Grant, whose desire for order in his life was the more profound of the two, thought about signing up with the Reserve Officers Training Corps at Princeton. Margaret wrote him in protest, saying that the military was likely to crush out his “own incentive and ideas of freedom.” Shortly thereafter he asked her advice about rejoining the Episcopal Church, where he long ago had been baptized as an infant. “I have outgrown the need of church by my interest in philosophy, psychology & humanity,” she responded. “Very often I find the church narrows & limits the mental horizon of a person when in reality it should broaden & deepen…be sure you really want it.” He ignored her warning and joined.
¹⁰

The influence of Noah Slee, whom both boys affectionately called Pater, became increasingly evident. Despite his enormous wealth, Slee was a penurious man by temperament and habit, who complained frequently about the extravagances of the young. For all his carping, however, he seems, in fact, to have been exceedingly generous to his stepsons and to his many other new beneficiaries.

Margaret rarely saw or socialized with members of the extended Higgins family during these years, yet she remained bound to her brothers and sisters by an intense, irrevocable tie to their common past, and in her newly comfortable circumstances, she faithfully looked after their fortunes. Nan Higgins retired from her position as a private secretary in New York and was sent up to Truro to nurse the failing Michael Higgins in the last years of his life. Her devotions were then repaid with a holiday in Europe and supplementation of her modest retirement income, so she could spend winters comfortably in California. Richard Higgins received financing for a wholesale corset business in San Francisco from the famous sister in New York, who was promoting the biological emancipation of women, and Ethel, though far too proud to take money directly, permitted her daughter Olive to accept a loan to cover her tuition at Tufts—a loan that was then forgiven. Other nieces and nephews were sent to camp or to Europe or taken on shopping expeditions in New York with nothing asked in return. (Years later Margaret would be visibly shaken when one of her favorites, her brother Bob's daughter Virginia, returned from a holiday with her aunt in England, married a Catholic boyfriend, and had a parcel of children.)

Slee's largesse extended to Margaret's friends and coworkers as well. A stipend of $50 per month was made available for Agnes Smedley, when she needed a psychoanalyst in Berlin in 1924, and more money was sent for an abdominal operation four years later. Kitty Marion, whose employment was abruptly and unceremoniously terminated by the American Birth Control League in 1929, had only to ask for help, as did countless other wards. In the late 1920s, as the occasion of Havelock Ellis's seventieth birthday approached, Margaret entreated Noah to provide an annual income that would allow Françoise Cyon to work as “the King's” full-time companion and secretary. With this money Ellis was also able to purchase a house in the country. The $1,500 annual salary was reduced by a third during the Depression, when Noah suffered temporary financial reverses, but Margaret did provide Ellis small sums of money until he died in 1939.

She grew accustomed to a life-style she could only have dreamed of without Slee, and yet the material enhancements he made possible always remained secondary to her work. Her remarriage and sudden wealth actually may have intensified her professional commitment, because she felt obliged to keep an upper hand with her husband by demonstrating that she could always manage to be economically independent, if necessary. She deliberately kept the income from her books, articles, and lecture fees in her own separate bank account, yet when she fell short of cash, showed no compunction about asking him for money—as had been the case in London in 1924, when he covered the fare for her first-class lodgings at the Stafford Hotel, where she held court for other admirers.
¹¹

Far more than these personal indulgences, however, it was Noah's extraordinary generosity to the birth control movement that solidified the bond between them. By 1925, he had already given nearly $50,000 to the American Birth Control League, which made him—by a factor of at least ten—its largest single source of support. At that point, Margaret began to barter herself for more money, promising her husband in a private letter that if he agreed to pay Dr. Cooper's salary for two years, and in so doing helped win medical endorsement for birth control, she would retire with him to “the Garden of Paradise.” The commitment, no doubt, underscored her resolve the following year to take some time off in Europe, though predictably, perhaps, she would spend only a fraction of it with Noah.