Woman of Valor (7 page)

Bill was twenty-eight years old at his marriage, a dashingly handsome young architect who had earned a degree at the tuition-free Cooper Union in New York, while supporting himself by working as an artisan in the fashionable stained-glass trade. By Margaret's account, he then worked for a time at the prestigious firm of McKim, Mead & White, and the legendary Stanford White identified him as one of the best young draftsmen in New York. Thoroughly absorbed in his work, he was overwhelmed by the depth of his response to this first love affair. Margaret, on the other hand, had as a basis of comparison the experience of what she later identified in the quaint fashion of the times as a “trial marriage” with Corey Albertson, but her apparent sexual experience seemed only to intensify Bill's desire. Many years later he could still summon the passion of their first encounter and insist that she had filled him “with the purest longing I ever experienced.”

For her own part, however unconsciously, Margaret may have been driven to find a man like her father in temperament and enthusiasm, who would also provide the emotional and economic security that had long eluded her. To be sure, she would find her marriage tolerable only so long as it rewarded her on these grounds.
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Similarities between husband and father were striking. Both were virile and emotionally effusive men—aesthetes and romantics—given to favor sentimental gestures over practical considerations. Both were idealists, intellectually and politically committed to doctrines of economic reform and social justice. Both were Socialists and rebels against religious orthodoxy. But Bill came from an observant Jewish family, a potentially complicating circumstance that may itself have accounted for some of the impulse and mystery surrounding the wedding. Only several weeks earlier, in confiding a concern to Mary about how her in-laws would look and behave, Margaret had, in fact, resorted to conventional ethnic stereotypes. The Sangers were preparing to have an “at home” for her, she wrote in a letter that reflected her immaturity and small-town insularity, but also outright prejudice. “Ye Gods I dread to meet them,” she continued, “I wonder if they will have long noses and own flashy diamonds—by the way, I am to have one.”
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The elder Sangers were Jewish immigrants who had come to New York with their two young children, William and Cecilia, from northeast Germany in 1878. Bill's father, listed variously on immigration and naturalization records and in city directories as “Edward Elias” or “Ely,” established himself in the city's burgeoning garment trades. He identified himself on two separate occasions as either a wool manufacturer or a yarn merchant. Margaret's autobiographies, instead, distinguish him as an English merchant, who was once deeded large tracts of land in Australia and met his wife, the daughter of the educated mayor of Konensburg, a small town in Germany, when he was traveling. While there is the possibility that Edward Sanger traveled before marrying and coming to America, the story seems at least in large part invented. Stuart Sanger, Margaret and Bill's first son, says that the only evidence of any exotic past was the pistol his grandfather left when he died at the age of sixty-eight in 1903. At his death, he was listed as resident with his wife, the former Henrietta Wolfberg, in a Bronx tenement.
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Yet the ethnicity Margaret perceived as a social disadvantage may initially have provided an important bond in her marriage. Marrying a Jew seems to have redressed her own sense of class and ethnic inferiority and perhaps explains why Bill, unlike Corey Albertson, was quickly introduced to her father, with whom he apparently got along quite well. And, apart from her youthful confidences to her sister, there is no evidence that Margaret was ever again overtly anti-Semitic, even in private. To the contrary, she found ethnic prejudice offensive, and when bigotry was virulent and even fashionable in some of the circles she frequented during the 1920s and '30s, she surrounded herself with Jewish colleagues and friends and displayed no apparent prejudice of her own. As she achieved public prominence, however, she went out of her way to disguise the truth about Bill's background and apparently never spoke to her children or grandchildren about it. At a time when informal Jewish quotas still existed, she also wrote a letter supporting the college application of Joan Sanger, Bill's daughter by a second marriage, identifying the girl as “a Protestant born of a long line of American citizens.”
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Chaotic from the start, the Sanger marriage came under further strain within six months of the wedding when Margaret became pregnant. She still suffered from tuberculosis, and like her mother before her, the physical stress of carrying a child aggravated the illness. But quite unlike Anne, she was immediately packed off to the Adirondacks to spend her confinement at the well-established Trudeau sanitarium at Saranac Lake and returned to the city only in time to give birth. The labor and the delivery were difficult. Stuart Sanger was born on November 28, 1903, and given the family name of her friend, Amelia. Years later, the attending physician would write to inquire “just what bearing my lack of knowledge of obstetrics may have had upon this profound movement that is so essentially yours,” and admit: “It was a hard night for both of us.”

Sent back upstate with her baby, Margaret installed herself in a farmhouse near the sanitarium and resumed a rigid regimen of sleep and fresh air and the prescribed daily diet of tuberculars: a dozen eggs, four quarts of milk, meat, vegetables, and creosote, a toxin thought to be effective in destroying the infection. When months passed and her health had not improved, she lapsed into what she subsequently described as a severe depression. She refused to eat at all and was advised again to enter the sanitarium.
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Saranac in the early years of this century reported “cure rates” for 70 percent of its patients, but often what was billed as a cure was only a remission of the disease. Before antibiotics, surgical procedures excising the infected tissue, of the kind performed on Margaret at White Plains, and again in England in the 1920s, offered the only hope of controlling local tubercular infections. Bedrest and nutrition, at best, only gave the body's natural immune system a chance to regenerate and contain the disease, while the thin air of high altitudes was supposed to provide less of the oxygen on which the germ depends for active growth. At its worst the community of the sanitarium provided fertile ground for contagion, and the incidence of patient death, though not advertised of course, was high. By her own account, Margaret refused hospitalization, defied medical orders, and returned to New York. Freed from her enforced isolation in the mountains, her outlook and appetite improved, and her condition again stabilized, but the recovery was slow, and she did not chance another pregnancy until five years after Stuart's birth.

Romantically inclined, the Sangers could not have been immune to a prevailing mythology of their culture that tuberculosis was at once a disease of body and soul, infusing its sufferers with a special dimension of spirituality and passion, even as it ravaged them physically. The wasting nature of the illness also served to reinforce a prevailing assumption of male culture—to which Bill certainly appeared sympathetic—that delicate, ethereal and dependent women were all the more alluring. Yet if tuberculosis in some measure infantalized women, it also, however paradoxically, gave them license to be sexual and seductive. The prospect of being cut off from life's experience encouraged defiance of established social and moral sanctions, and, indeed, it was not only in the sanitaria of literary invention that high altitudes gave way to giddy behavior.
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Many years later Margaret spoke privately to her sons, and with uncharacteristic reverence, of the young love she had shared with their father. She once told another confidant, as well, that she had learned everything she ever knew about romantic love from Bill Sanger. In an age of still imperfect contraception, however, this coupling of passion with the prohibition on pregnancy advised as a result of Margaret's illness could only have been a strain. It most certainly made reliable birth control a condition of marital satisfaction, and in her subsequent disdain of popular but imperfect contraceptive practices such as condoms and withdrawal, she undoubtedly spoke with authority born of personal experience.
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The young couple had rented a house in Hastings-on-Hudson, a newly developing community of families like their own just up the river from New York City, but Margaret's contentment with the security and status of this environment proved to be short-lived. She later blamed her growing sense of futility in this setting on her prior experiences as a nurse “in the midst of life,” but the turmoil of her childhood did not predispose her to domesticity or suburban complacency, and her illness may have also intensified her unrest. She exhibited behavior commonly associated with chronic tuberculosis. Having tarried for so long with a disease believed to be terminal, she could never seem to settle down, and in the eyes of Olive Byrne Richard, who remembered her from these years, seemed literally to “float” from one activity to another, as though she were impatient with tameness and eager for an adventure comparable to the challenge of standing up to death.

This accelerated behavior left her strangely indifferent to the responsibilities of mothering, and despite a conscious effort to compensate for the deprivations of her own childhood, she never gave her children the sustained attention they demanded and deserved. There were the requisite shopping expeditions and trips into the city and summer outings to the Rockaway Beach on Long Island, but Margaret was always just “sort of patting little children on the head in passing,” according to Olive, who also observed: “I remember (strange that I should remember) she always burned the cocoa.”
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In 1908, Margaret gave birth to a second son, Grant, and only twenty months later, a daughter was born and given the same name as her mother. Bill Sanger called them both by the affectionate diminutive Peggy. Though Margaret later remembered that she had reveled in having babies to tend, she also feared they would contract her illness and therefore approached them with reluctance. She hired wet nurses and nannies to supervise their nurture, and with this rationale seems to have related to her children with what was perhaps a predictable distance and self-absorption. Understandably, she also found the incessant demands and petty rivalries of three young children increasingly provoking. She worried about Grant, who by contrast to his older, more assertive brother, seemed especially sensitive and hungry for affection, and she may have unwittingly intensified this middle child's discomforts by delighting in the carefree and vivacious personality of his adored baby sister.

There is also evidence that despite Bill's enormous devotion to his children, the question of his help with the housework and the “kiddies,” as he called them, became a recurring source of friction. Life in a white house with a rolling lawn did not turn out to be as carefree as Margaret expected. Intensely disdainful of housework, she employed a maid for as long as she could afford to do so, but years later admitted having neglected her children to the point that the “thrifty, good housekeeping neighbors took them into their laps, removed the safety pins that held their clothes together and sewed on a proper button.” She also discovered that routine household cooking was a loathsome burden, though she liked to cook occasionally as a form of recreation. What is more, Bill sometimes consented to wash the supper dishes when he came home from the city, but only after he drew the shades, so as not to be seen in a compromising assignment.
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Early in 1908, the Sangers finished building the house in Hastings that Bill had lovingly designed for his young family. Thoroughly modern by the standards of the day in its structural simplicity and white stucco facade, it was billed in a local newspaper as one of the town's “showplaces.” With a large nursery opening onto a veranda overlooking the Hudson, and a yard shaded by graceful catalpa and locust trees, the structure embraced his most sentimental vision of life. For months he returned from his job in the city each night to labor with Margaret over its most spectacular adornment, an intricate rose window of lead and stained-glass that illumined the staircase. This personal detail was intended to represent the stability of the life they were building together, but as though it were an augur of the future, the faulty installation of a furnace caused a fire only days after the Sangers moved in, destroying the window and almost all of the interior furnishings. The house was restored without the window, and along with the symbolism, the family did not survive intact. With land and construction costs exceeding $12,000, Bill found himself considerably overextended financially an impracticality Margaret could never forgive. The sad experience, she later claimed, convinced her forever of the futility of material possessions.
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Never resigned to the ravages of the fire, and desperately short of cash, Bill sold this suburban property in 1910 and plunged back into the faster pace of urban life. He took a railroad flat uptown in New York City's Washington Heights section with just enough room for his widowed mother, who came to board and help care for the children, while Margaret found work as a visiting nurse and midwife in order to help make ends meet. The motivation behind this move was money, not ideology, but the transition liberated her to pursue an independent and self-fulfilling life. For Bill, however, it was a different matter altogether. Many years later, he would still regret the sale of the only real estate he ever owned. More than just a home, it was the expression of a confidence in himself and an enthusiasm for life he never recaptured.
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