1958–1959
Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
—Susan Sontag
NINETEEN FIFTY-EIGHT ROARED IN WITH a series of heavy rains that flooded the basement of Petite Plaisance, disabling the furnace and hot water heater. Northeast Harbor dispatched the town pump to siphon water out of the cellar into the backyard, but it seeped right back in.1 Frick soon discovered that several nearby homes were having the same problem and, with her usual verve, proceeded to insist that the town improve the drainage along South Shore Road. The day after the second flooding, she booked passage on the SS Constitution to Italy. It would be her and Marguerite’s “fourth trip for Europe together, not counting trips there in 1937.”2
In New York Mrs. August Belmont, doyenne of the Northeast Harbor summer community, invited Yourcenar and Frick for tea with John Farrar and Roger Straus. After cocktails at the home of Jacques and Anya Kayaloff, they took Erika Vollger to the opening of Tristan und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera.3 The next morning the women checked a few references at the New York Public Library before sailing—with Monsieur Popover, of course—at noon.
Grace had always loved traveling by ship, however wild the weather. She once told Gladys Minear, before she and Marguerite had ever crossed the Atlantic together, “I have been in one gale at sea, one full gale, and I can still experience the wild excitement of it if I shut my eyes and listen hard for that wind, that very strange, unearthly wind, such as I had never known before.”4 To Gertrude Fay, a friend and fellow travel lover, Grace would later write that “a train—any train—or a horse, or a ship at sea in full gale are just my cup of tea.”5 She and Marguerite would soon taste that kind of excitement together.
Their ship had passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, sailing along the Spanish coast. They had been warned to expect rough weather; what they got was a violent storm that overturned chairs in the dining room and kept people up all night as Captain Valson steamed toward Cannes.6 But the next day found the three travelers safely disembarking in Genoa and taking the train to Turin. Straightaway they hailed a horse-drawn carriage for a tour of the city. Marguerite had a sore throat the next day, but Grace was in fine fettle and spent the afternoon exploring the Egyptian Museum with Monsieur.
They would spend four months in Italy. For once, this trip abroad was more about leisure than lecturing. Two decades after their first Italian travels together, Grace and Marguerite retraced many of their early steps. In Rome they stayed again at La Residenza, in a room, Grace noted, next door to the one they shared in 1937.7 In Florence the couple revisited San Marco’s Fra Angelicos.8 For most of May they made their base the Hotel Sirena in Sorrento, where Yourcenar had finished writing Le Coup de grâce in 1938.9 This time they were working on the proofs of the Cavafy volume, which would finally come out later in 1958 after years of legal wrangling. In the Gulf of Naples they swam in the Tyrrhenian Sea. At Capri they climbed Mount Tiberius and made a leisurely visit to the ancient Roman Villa Jovis.10 Back on the mainland they took a car to the new excavations of the ancient Greek settlement at Cumae.11 In Paestum they saw ancient temples in sunset and twilight.12 They took carrozze to the opera, cocktail parties, cafés, and museums, often noting in the daybook the names of their horses.
At the very end of the daybook for 1958, Grace made a list of the “Finest sights in Turin and Rome.” Here is a small sampling of the salient entries:
| March 9, | Milan, Hotel Manin, “Monsieur” seduces the chambermaid, who calls him “Monsieur Nanetto,” the dwarf |
| [March 15], | “Monsieur” peering from under the blanket at our feet, in a carriage in Borghese Gardens |
| March 19, | “Monsieur” flattening his belly against the grass on a cliff above Tempio, Villa Adriana |
| March 25, | Tuesday, “Monsieur” escaping from his parking place, at the umbrella stand, to trail us into the Bank President’s office (Osio) and station himself exactly under the dog in the Antinoüs relief (Antinoüs of Antonianus of Aphrodisias)13 |
Leave it to Monsieur Popover to strike a pose under the image of a fellow canine in a second-century Roman bas-relief!
In mid-April Marguerite—not the hardiest of travelers—caught a cold.14 By May 10, in Sorrento, she was diagnosed with enteritis. A month later, on June 10, the couple left Genoa for home with their twenty-three pieces of luggage. They had booked passage on a Greek ship, the TSS Olympia. Disappointingly for Grace, the sea was too rough for Greek dancing.
On July 9 back in Maine, Frick went to see Dr. Ernest Coffin about a change she had noticed six months earlier in the contour of her left breast. Yourcenar would later say she had “a little tumor in her breast so undefined that it was almost impossible to decide if it existed or not.”15 There was no palpable lump and no pain—until late June. What led Frick to consult Dr. Coffin as much as the very slight change in her breast was a bit of discomfort in her left arm. The news was not good. Frick had never been one to discuss her feelings at great length—Yourcenar would say she was too Anglo-Saxon for that. The furthest she went in that regard was to call July 10, the day after she saw Dr. Coffin, a “dismal” day. She who noted Marguerite’s every ache and sniffle rarely spoke of her own health. On July 11 the couple went to see the surgeon, who assured them “her case would not be a serious one.” Three days later he performed a radical mastectomy.
Marguerite was beside herself with worry. She knew all too well the ravages of cancer. The disease had killed the two most cherished beings of her youth, Jeanne de Vietinghoff and Michel de Crayencour. She rented a room from Lloyd Lurvey on Hancock Street in Bar Harbor, a three-minute walk from the island hospital. There she would stay for ten days during Grace’s operation and recovery. Frick, of course, had always been the one to aid sick relatives and friends. This time the tables were turned. Although Yourcenar herself was being treated for a painful infection, she did everything she could to help her companion. She took charge of reporting Grace’s “good result” to Aunt Dolly and sister-in-law Thelma Frick,16 and she foiled the attempts of concerned Kansas City relations to travel to Maine to see the patient. She decorated the hospital room with flowers sent by Grace’s brother Gage, Bernice Pierce, and the publishers Farrar and Straus. And she remained at Grace’s side throughout the medical ordeal.
In the daybook on the date of her surgery Frick wrote with wry understatement and what one can only imagine to be humor: “Dr. Silas Coffin operates on G. to remove small tumor. No bad after-effects except for M.Y.” She said almost the same thing the same day about Monsieur, who entered the “hospital” on July 14 “to have small tumor removed.” By July 22, she felt well enough to quip, “Grace had stitches out one day before Doggo did.” Five days later she was hosting Monsieur’s third birthday party.17
Frick’s dressing was still being changed every couple of days when “X-ray treatments” began on August 11. They were done at Eastern Maine Memorial Hospital in Bangor, fifty miles from Northeast Harbor, and would last for three weeks. Both women made the daily trips in a rented car with Frick at the wheel. They stayed in Winterport to cut down on the length of their drive.
During that first week of radiation treatment, Frick and Yourcenar, if anything, were more active than ever. On day two they invited their friends Gertrude Fay and Betsy Melcher to join them at a concert by the Polish-born classical pianist Artur Balsam in the coastal village of Blue Hill. Staying overnight at the Blue Hill House afterward, they paid a call the next morning on Adelaide Pearson at Rowantrees Pottery. At the urging of Mahatma Gandhi, Pearson and her young companion, Laura Paddock, had founded a pottery cooperative in Blue Hill in the mid-1930s. Frick and Yourcenar loved their rustic mugs, plates, and bowls made of local clay, and they eventually made Rowantrees their everyday tableware. The four women became friends, with Yourcenar once saying that Pearson and Paddock belonged “to the best type of American women of an already past era, adventurous, enterprising, unassuming, open to the whole world, and still anxious to help locally with the welfare of people.”18 Coincidentally, Adelaide Pearson was also the second cousin of Grace’s longtime friend Phyllis Bartlett.
And so the days passed, one by one, with the women returning to Winterport after Frick’s daily sessions in Bangor and spending weekends at Petite Plaisance. After treatment number five, alternating front and back, Frick reported, “All going well.”19 Not until the seventh treatment did she experience a radiation burn on her shoulder blade. Still, the couple continued to make every trip an outing, whether by picnicking somewhere along the way, visiting historic sites in the region, or even driving all the way to West Boothbay to see their friends Jean and Roger Hazelton.20 In the end Frick had a total of eighteen radiation sessions without missing a beat.
Which does not mean it was easy. In the present age of breast-cancer ribbons and license plates, cancer-cure clothing and cosmetics, walkathons and races, it is hard to imagine what it was like to have cancer in the 1950s. Not once does Frick herself—or possibly even her doctors—ever actually use the dreaded term. The fact that Marguerite ignored her work and wrote almost no letters during the months of her companion’s treatment is proof enough that the couple took the matter seriously. Not only could the illness be fatal, but in the case of breast cancer at a time when the wholesale removal of tissue, muscles, and lymph nodes was still standard practice, one survived only at the cost of radical disfigurement. Even as late as 1964, when Rachel Carson succumbed to breast cancer, “an individual’s experience of breast cancer was still a private affair,” as Ellen Leopold has written. “The disease was still an iceberg, a killer in the dark, without even a visible tip to draw attention to itself.”21
Frick’s courage and composure in confronting her plight, as well as her companion’s sense of helplessness, are suggested by an astonishing statement that Yourcenar made to Élie Grekoff seven weeks after Grace’s last radiation treatment. First, without going into specifics, she told Grekoff what a serious health crisis they had been through. She then informed him that Grace was “now completely well,” adding, “but you can imagine the extent to which my life (more than that of Grace herself) was turned upside down.”22
Frick had been lucky. Her scar was clean, and the radiation treatments had apparently killed any cancer cells that had not been surgically removed. She dove back into life with all the energy and zeal she was known for, and then some. Marguerite dove right in with her.
That October, on the day Frick was officially discharged from the X-ray department of the Bangor hospital, the couple headed north for a three-day camping trip. They slept that night in a cabin north of Old Town, home of the Penobscot Nation. It took them from noon until dark the next day to reach the Seboeis River Campground a few miles east of the northeastern corner of Baxter State Park. Hunting season had begun, and the first thing they saw, hanging from a tree at that campground, was a freshly killed deer. In deep distress, they turned around to head toward home, and spent the night at Millinocket’s Great Northern Hotel. Yourcenar later told Élie Grekoff that their excursion to “the very beautiful mountainous region in the middle of the state was completely ruined” by hunters and their quarry.23 The trauma was somewhat assuaged the next morning by two live deer, two moose, and two grouse the women spotted in the southwest corner of the park. They went on to hike part of the Appalachian Trail that day toward Mount Katahdin, following Nesowadnehunk Stream almost to Niagara Falls. As was so often the case for these two, they were again retracing their own footsteps: Yourcenar and Frick had made a similar trip in late September 1949. They spent their last night away at Mrs. Muzzey’s Indian Hill Farm in Greenville, where they had stayed the time before.24
They never did end up camping out this time, but they would do so in 1959, when they stayed at Roaring Brook Campground in Baxter State Park. That year they avoided hunting season altogether by visiting the park in August. For two nights they slept in sleeping bags in a wooden lean-to. A bear cub came promptly at tea time to the trash bins not far from their shelter, looking for food. They also saw five or six brown-speckled spruce partridges, several dark-brown rabbits, a bull moose, two cows, and two calves. Most memorably, however, as Bérengère Deprez has noted, they had an encounter that found its way into Yourcenar’s last work of fiction, the novella An Obscure Man, part of which takes place on Mount Desert Island. One late afternoon, while the two campers were hiking north of Katahdin Stream Campground, Frick reported in the daybook, “we saw a large black bear cub on the road ahead of us, who would not move out of our way. After a snarl or two he sat down and placidly ate berries, combing through them from a bush into his mouth with his two paws, in alternation. Slowly moved off into the woods as he heard the ranger’s truck approaching, on its way to the dump which was his haunt.”25 In Yourcenar’s fictional account, “Although bears were rare on the island, where they hardly ever ventured except in winter when the ice supported them, Nathanaël came upon one, completely alone, gathering into his great paw all the raspberries from a bush and stuffing them into his mouth with such an exquisite pleasure that the boy practically experienced it himself.”26
It is probably not coincidental that in 1959, the year after cancer reared its head, Grace for the first time kept a second daybook, reserving it almost exclusively for observations of nature and experiences likely to feed the human spirit. In this second notebook, “Grace Frick Diary (Part 2),” she might comment on the beauty of snow in the moonlight or list the different species of birds that came to feeders at Petite Plaisance. After dinner on January 12 and again the next day, Grace and Marguerite listened together in the parlor to a recording of Schubert’s Quintet in C Major. Long walks and wildlife sightings are described: on March 26, “‘Jo’ our chipmunk reappeared from under the porch being in strictly private quarters since November. He began working on the west side coconut feeder at once. Looks rather thin, but is as agile as ever.”27 On March 28 the northern lights blazed in the night sky on either side of the Big Dipper. Easter morning found Grace and Marguerite playing a Russian requiem mass on their spinet piano. Then they set off together on foot, in fur coats and rubber-soled shoes, for the Somesville Meeting House almost eight miles away! They probably thought it was a safe bet that someone they knew would pick them up; happily, both ways, someone did.
Frick and Yourcenar had always been attuned to the natural beauty surrounding them on Mount Desert Island, but Grace’s observations in this second daybook make clear that she was paying more attention than she ever had before, realizing at some level how fortunate she was to still be there to take it all in. In September of that year, as if to prove to herself how healthy she was, Grace started horseback riding again. Before long she was clearing hurdles at a trot, with and without stirrups. Eventually she would talk Marguerite into joining her.
The women were also redoubling their attention to their own patch of nature. Paul and Gladys Minear had sent them bulbs from Holland, which they got into the ground before winter. Grace wrote to thank them in November, mentioning also the Austrian pine that Paul had planted on their property in 1951. “Marguerite often says, ‘Our garden is full of Minears!’ You would never believe how passionate she is about digging into the soil around this two-by-four house.”28 Yourcenar was particularly proud of their rare cherry trees, which would often yield a bountiful harvest. To Élie Grekoff she wrote in July about “the ever courageous ‘Angel’” Grace: “Right now she is picking Montmorency cherries (for the first time) from the young cherry trees in the garden. And since she is wearing a toile de Jouy dress purchased in Capri with big cherries painted on it, she makes a rather gay figure against the green background.”29
As the women reconnected with the earth, they were also reviving old friendships and opening up to new ones. Frick joined the Eastern Maine Wellesley Club and attended her first meeting at the Pilot’s Grill in Bangor, taking Marguerite along with her.30 She would make a point of attending her thirty-fifth reunion in June of 1960. The couple renewed ties as well with a man they had known since their 1945 summer stay in Southwest Harbor, Alfred “Alf” Pasquale, who was naturalized as an American in 1957. He and his companion Chuck Curtis had brought Grace bouquets of cosmos to celebrate her recovery from surgery. The two couples often went for picnics, boat rides, and moonlight drives together on the “quiet side” of Mount Desert Island.
In mid-September 1959 Frick and Yourcenar showed up unannounced on the doorstep of the artist Chenoweth Hall and the author Miriam Colwell, having just seen an exhibit of Hall’s paintings and sculpture at the Northeast Harbor Neighborhood House.31 They were on a weekend jaunt up the coast in a rental car. Chenoweth Hall was a transplant from New York City who had moved to Prospect Harbor, where Miriam Colwell was postmistress, in 1939. Hall had read Memoirs of Hadrian and could not believe her eyes when its author appeared at her door. The two couples developed a friendship, having tea and sharing meals at each other’s homes. They even spoke of going abroad together, though the plan never came to fruition.32 They had a lot in common in addition to their various kinds of creativity. Like Grace and Marguerite, Miriam and Chenoweth had met and come together in the late 1930s. Both couples were dog lovers. Both loved art and travel. When Chenoweth died in 1999, she and Miriam had shared a home for more than fifty years.33
In mid-December 1959 Grace and Marguerite set off on a new trip overseas aboard the TSS Olympia, sailing from New York to Portugal. The seas were very strong on that voyage, resulting in a heavy roll that lasted three straight days. For Monsieur and Marguerite, both a bit delicately constituted, it was a long and queasy crossing. For the gale-loving Grace, as much at home rolling in the deep as on the back of a galloping horse, it was pure bliss.