Mrs. Willoughby's Letters

by MARY ELIZABETH PLUMMER

1

MRS. WILLOUGIIBY could see it as clearly as if it had appeared in type. There would be a small advertisement in the Sunday New York Times some day, seeking letters written by Mrs. Peter Willoughby, especially those written in her teens, when she was Janet Tucker. “Letters sent for use in the forthcoming volume will be carefully returned,” the advertisement would say. “The Blake correspondence is of particular interest.” Then the heirs of Henry Blake would send a packet of her letters to New York, and it would all come out, like the correspondence of Tchaikovsky and Mme. von Meck.

Just what she would have done, in the meantime, to have catapulted her to fame and brought public demand for her correspondence, still was unrevealed to Mrs. Willoughby; but sometimes, she reflected, mere events, over which one has no control, lift one into the limelight. She considered writing to Henry Blake in this vein: —

DEAR HENRY: —
How have things been going with you since we last met in 1922?
I should appreciate it, Henry, if you would return the letters I wrote to you in 1918.
Sincerely,
JANET WILLOUGHBY

P. S. Please destroy this note.

Mrs. Willoughby occasionally remarked to her eminently satisfactory husband, James Peter Willoughby, that there had been nothing bad about her letters to Henry Blake, but that there were certain passages in them that were — well — silly.

“So what?” Jim was wont to inquire. “Everybody has written some silly letters.”

“Including you, Jim darling?”

“Certainly,” Jim always replied with a warm, reminiscent smile that wasn’t even faintly rueful. “But I don’t worry about it.”

That was true. Jim didn’t worry. His mind was as free as a bird. Jim also hadn’t saved any old letters from “other ladies” — the general appellation Mrs. Willoughby applied to girls Jim had known before he met her.

Mrs. Willoughby herself had kept only four letters of a passionate nature from men other than Jim. They were from the four men, other than Jim, who had proposed marriage to her. She kept the letters in an Adam desk, in the Willoughbys’ late Georgian living-room on Sutton Place South.

One of them was from a Harvard senior who had courted her in what Mrs. Willoughby now called “my Cynara stage.” The letter addressed her as Cynara, and went on at a great rate about how he had flung roses riotously with the throng and now was desolate and sick of an old passion.

Another was from a Bar Harbor boy with whom she had played tennis when her family went to Maine for the summer. It covered ten pages, the gist of it being that something about her made him feel wordless.

Then there was a letter giving its author’s idea of a perfect wedding trip, on a small lazy steamer across the Atlantic and slowly through the Mediterranean. “I would sit in a steamer chair, covered with a warm steamer rug, you beside me also in a chair, and we would either be spellbound by the beauty of the Grecian mountains or would talk of the past and future in the cool twilight. The slow chug, chug of the engines . . .”

The fourth letter started with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lines: —

It was amorous in unmistakable terms.

Mrs. Willoughby’s reason for keeping a token letter from each of these men, she didn’t exactly know, but she felt that at least her three children, Peter, Jane, and Joyce, would be interested some day. (“Mummy was quite attractive, wasn’t she? She had five offers of marriage.”)

Once or twice she had wondered whether the four men, who were long since married, would be happy to know that one of their letters still reposed in her Adam desk; but she wondered a great deal more whether Henry Blake still had any of her letters in his desk out in California.

There were certain flights of fancy in her old Blake correspondence; certain sentence structures, metaphors, and allegories that embarrassed Mrs. Willoughby. They were not — well — illustrative of her at her best. They represented one of her earlier phases. As she progressed gracefully further and further into maturity, leaving her outgrown shells by life’s unresting sea, she had become increasingly dissatisfied with her earlier phases, in which she had not been quite so conscious of the artistic value of the word left unsaid.

Another trouble in connection with her Blake correspondence was that she could not now remember accurately all that she had written to Henry Blake and mailed, as opposed to what she had merely contemplated writing and what she had written and not mailed. She thought that she had once written to him expressing the hope that he would have children, “that thereby beauty’s rose might never die,” but she wasn’t sure whether or not she had mailed the letter. She would never be sure, unless by chance she saw Henry Blake and found out, by some circuitous route.

She felt certain that she had quoted to Henry Blake, by mail, literary fragments ranging from Beowulf and the Venerable Bede to Siegfried Sassoon, simply because, at the time, he had seemed related to every idea she came across. She had quoted far too much. She also had written to him various philosophical abstractions and introspections, because she thought that he was attracted to her and wanted to know how she felt about things.

Some of these passages Mrs. Willoughby could not bear to repeat now, even in her own mind. Without actually repeating them, she would shudder and murmur to herself, “Silly — silly!” For example, in some of the letters, she had saluted Henry Blake as “Pietà.” At that time she had thought that “Pietà” was an Italian term of endearment, and had not realized that it referred to the Crucified Lord in the arms of His Mother. If these letters ever reached the public eye, Mrs. Willoughby reflected, people would think that she was irreverent, in addition to being slightly touched.

She also had written to Henry Blake once — and she was sure she had mailed this —that he was “as beautiful as Narcissus looking over a pool’s edge.” This reference to Narcissus was an unintentional libel. At the time she had forgotten the fine points of the Narcissus legend; but the Narcissus reference didn’t embarrass her as much as the “pool’s edge” part. She wished that she had said “the edge of a pool.”

“Lolly,” Mrs. Willoughby said one day in 1941 to her architect friend, Lolly Winters, when they were chatting on the Willoughbys’ satin-covered sofa, “have you ever thought that some day the letters you’ve written might be published?”

Lolly, who had designed only one house, — the functional gatehouse on the Winters estate, — admitted that she had thought of such an eventuality. An uneasy expression flickered across her face.

“When I was extremely young,” said Mrs. Willoughby, looking charming in a candystriped tea gown, “I used to write to a man named Henry Blake, an older man who was at that time in love with my sister. I felt that he was really in love with me, but he wasn’t. Anyway, he seemed to find my letters diverting. He always wrote that he looked forward to hearing from me again. I wish I knew where those letters are.”

“Where is he?” asked Lolly Winters.

“I’m not sure. I think he married some woman in San Francisco.”

“How long ago was it?”

“1918.”

They exchanged a look of understanding. You can’t safely ask any man for letters you wrote him that far back.

“However, I should dislike seeing those letters in my published correspondence,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “if I ever should do anything that would cause it to be.”

“What all did you tell him?” inquired Lolly.

“I told him that I was haunted by beauty,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “and that I should like to be a lighter of flames. I wrote to him that all the men in New York seemed inadequate compared to him — that they were lacking in manhood or something.” Mrs. Willoughby winced, and added, “I called him ‘Pietà.’”

“Once,” said Lolly, “when I was quite young, an older man, who was very attractive, told me I was so innocent I reminded him of Alice Meynell’s ‘shepherdess of sheep.’ I was terribly intrigued, and kept the idea alive for months. I used to sign my letters to him, ‘The Shepherdess.’”

2

Mrs. Willoughby and Lolly hadn’t much time to worry about their collected correspondence that winter, however, because of increased pressure of world events and one thing and another. The thought of her old letters did not cross Mrs. Willoughby’s mind again until the Westminster Kennel Club show opened in Madison Square Garden and she saw in the New York Times a picture of Henry Blake of California as one of the exhibitors, photographed with one of his whippets.

That afternoon, Mrs. Peter Willoughby and Henry Blake brushed shoulders, by careful arrangement of Mrs. Willoughby, in an exhibit aisle in the Garden. He still had that rugged look she had found so pleasing, but he looked considerably older and a little florid. When she found him, he was watching a whippet lifting its leg.

“Ah,” thought Mrs. Willoughby. “Under what adverse circumstances one always meets one’s former idols!”

She laid her hand lightly on his arm and said, “Aren’t you Henry Blake?”

“Why, yes,” said Henry Blake. He looked down at her face, prettily framed by mink, and obviously racked his brain.

I am Mrs. Peter Willoughby.”

“How do you do.”

After all, she thought, he didn’t know she had been married.

“You knew me as Janet Tucker.”

“Oh, yes. Of course!” he said, obviously groping.

Mrs. Willoughby was forced to add, “The last time I saw you was in Mount Kisco.”

“New York?” said Henry Blake, trying to locate the area of the country involved.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Willoughby. “You used to come to see my sister, Emily Tucker.” At this point, she suddenly felt humiliated.

Henry Blake brightened. She had thrown him an anchor. The dayspring of recognition appeared in his face.

“I was Janie Tucker,” said Mrs. Willoughby.

“Well, well! Little Janie Tucker!” he said. “Why don’t you write to me any more?”

“I did write an awful lot, didn’t I?” said Mrs. Willoughby winningly. “How nice of you to remember.”

Then she murmured, “I was very young, and I’m afraid my letters were rather silly—”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Henry Blake, eager to make amends for not remembering her sooner. “I remember them as being quite delightful — full of fancy and imagery. I always felt that you had a very interesting mind.”

They strolled toward the Doberman pinschers. Mrs. Willoughby looked very pretty.

“You know,” he said, “I wish I had kept some of those letters. Well-written letters from a fresh young girl with a philosophical approach to life are very rare indeed. I should like to read them now.”

“So should I,” said Mrs. Willoughby. “I should like to know what I was like then.”

“May I assure you that you were charming? I should not say you were. You are. By the way, how is Emily?”

When Mrs. Willoughby returned home after the dog show, she went to her Adam desk, took out the four letters from men other than Jim, and threw them into the open wood fire. It was the least she could do, after that meeting with Henry Blake. She would do unto others as she had been done by; for civilized society, she reflected, is founded on confidence, and one simply trusts that people — nice people — don’t leave silly old letters lying around.

She sat down on the satin-covered sofa and looked into the fire while the “chug, chug of the engines ” line in the letter about the ideal wedding trip turned to ashes.

Then she began to think about some of the things Henry Blake had said. “So fanciful — so full of imagery — so rare, from a fresh young girl.”

It really was rather a shame he had destroyed those letters. After all, she had worked rather hard over them, and they did contain some lovely things. Parts of them would have looked quite nice in print some day.

She could almost see them — say in Chapter VI of her collected letters, printed in beautiful type on a good rag paper: —

CHAPTER VI

HER BLAKE CORRESPONDENCE

MOUNT KISCO
April 3, 1918

PIETÀ:—
Today I was thinking . . .