1978-1979
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops—at all.
—Emily Dickinson
AS FEARLESSLY AS SHE ONCE denounced a fraudulent Pendergast voter in 1930s Kansas City, or swam so far out to sea that she frightened her friends, or marched up to the likes of Marguerite Yourcenar in a Paris hotel, or admonished academic officials who rejected her junior college girls on account of their race or religion, or plunged into a Canadian forest in the middle of the night hoping to encounter a bear, or found a way by sheer force of will to see the midnight sun again with her partner of four decades, Grace Frick set off alone in the dead of January 1979 on a desperate seven-hundred-mile journey to one of America’s foremost cancer-treatment centers. At the Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, New York, she would receive photodynamic therapy, a technique that uses intense forms of light to destroy cancer cells.1 The American Cancer Society describes the treatment today as having no long-term side effects when properly performed, with little scarring once targeted sites have healed.2 That would not be Frick’s experience, however.
Marguerite did not go with Grace to Buffalo. Frick insisted on traveling alone.3 The trip, by bus and by train, took twenty-four straight hours in a raging blizzard.4 The treatment was administered for ten days. As Yourcenar later reported, by the time Frick went to Roswell Park, her cancer had spread everywhere. “All she accomplished was getting third-degree burns all over her body, which only made her suffering worse.”5
Grace was still not ready to give up, and Marguerite did accompany her on another medical expedition shortly after she returned from Buffalo. The destination this time was Dr. Kaighn Smith’s office in Philadelphia. Dr. Smith and his wife, Ann, had purchased a summer home near Petite Plaisance in 1968. One day, Ann remembered, they came home to find on their porch a wooden berry basket “filled with sweet grass, almost like a little bird’s nest. And there were a variety of things in there: some quail eggs, a little salt cellar, some sweet-smelling ferns, with a little, almost like a little poem: Salt from the sea / Eggs from the birds / Grass from the earth, apropos of the Easter season bringing hope and renewal.”6 There was no indication of who had left it there, but the culprit of course was “Miss Frick.”
Dr. Smith had an obstetrics and gynecology practice in Philadelphia. He was not a breast cancer specialist, but he was a friend. Frick and Yourcenar had attended his daughter Gay’s wedding a few weeks earlier.7 “She came down to see me in Philadelphia,” Smith recalled. “‘Madame’ was with her, and they took the bus. . . . She had a messy tumor, there’s no question about it.”8 But there was nothing Dr. Smith could do to help.
Frick’s skin had broken down so badly from the laser treatments that her chest was oozing serous fluid. Every day until the end of her life, her dressings had to be changed to staunch the flow. The dressings were soaked in Clorox, as Ruth Westphal explained: “You just dip the sterile dressing in the solution and lay it on the chest, to cover it, and then you change it again. It was done twice a day, and it was kind of sweet. They always had the fireplace burning, so we would burn her dressings afterwards. When I came in the afternoon, it was maybe my last visit of the day, and sometimes they would insist I stay for tea.”9 When the operation was done, Grace simply rose from her bed and carried on with the day. “She was so brave,” Dee Dee Wilson recalled, “I just can’t tell you how brave she was. . . . We just kept care of her chest, with kindness really. She never complained. She never, ever complained.”10
And there were reasons to. The months that followed Frick’s last-ditch attempts to stop the cancer raging through her body brought a constant stream of Parisian journalists to her door. Unable to control her disease, Frick put her ever more feverish energies into protecting her companion from collapse at the hands of the French media. As she wrote to Gertrude Fay in mid-February about Matthieu Galey, “[Marguerite’s] interviewer from L’Express, Paris, is here for the week, and started in the day you called, recording steadily from 2:00 to 7:00 p.m., with only a break for one cup of tea. She was nearly dead from fatigue and hunger, and I from anxiety for her. Today I packed him off at 6:00, and will hold him firmly to that schedule.”11 Galey’s recording sessions were so exhausting that Yourcenar wound up in the hospital. Galey even went so far as to appear at her bedside there to extract from his hapless interlocutor the conclusion of an interview interrupted by the author’s chest pains!12
Things went even worse with another Parisian journalist, Jean-Paul Kauffmann, who wrote for Le Matin. Kauffmann came to Northeast Harbor on May 9 or 10, 1979, and as Grace wrote (in French) in the margin of one of Marguerite’s letters to Jeanne Carayon, “He stayed for five hours, and I had to throw him out!!”13 Not satisfied with Yourcenar’s answers to his questions, Kauffmann sent the author an additional list of queries the day after their meeting, which Yourcenar duly corrected for its errors of grammar and incivility. The most annoying of Kauffmann’s seven questions, judging from the length of Yourcenar’s response, seems to have been, “Is it your taste for perfection that prevents you from opening up completely?” Yourcenar did not try to conceal her annoyance:
The response to such a question is difficult, because the question itself creates the effect of a magma of errors.
a) The taste for perfection and the desire or the will to “open up completely” have nothing in common, with the result that the question has the effect of a leap in logic, if not a jump from pillar to post.
b) By what measure do you judge that a person whom you do not know “is not opening up completely”? My personality, like my house, is open to everyone, and I believe that is the case for most authentic personalities.14
Whether Galey or Kauffmann or some other importunate journalist was responsible for inaugurating the tradition, these months of relentless media attention may have been what prompted Yourcenar to start using prearranged signals to Frick that the time had come to show their guest to the door. Dee Dee Wilson was one of the few people who had an intimate acquaintance with the couple’s household at that time. In light of the negative things that have been said about Frick by so many French journalists and authors, I asked Wilson once what she thought about Frick’s gate-keeping role. “It took me a while to realize that no matter what Grace did, Marguerite was in charge,” Dee replied. “And if she were rude to someone, she was allowed to be rude to that person. She told them, ‘It is time for you to go, Madame Yourcenar is tired.’”15
Dee Dee also had occasion to learn that Frick could be full of the devil. “Oh, she was,” Wilson remembered. “When I had the wonderful experience of getting to know her, I found her really mischievous, elf-like. And it was wonderful to find this trait in a woman who was so formidable in town and had been to me. You know, eyes twinkling and covering her face with her hand to keep from laughing out loud so someone downstairs with Marguerite wouldn’t hear.”16
Wilson, whose longtime home in Northeast Harbor could be quickly reached by a path through the Petite Plaisance wood garden, also witnessed moments of intimacy between Yourcenar and Frick, even in the latter months and weeks of Frick’s life. When I mentioned that Robert Lalonde had tried to convey the women’s love and their playfulness in Un Jardin entouré de murailles, Wilson answered, “Yes! Well, I’ve seen that. They had voice signals . . . If Grace was upstairs and Marguerite was down and Grace wanted her attention, she’d go . . . ,” at which point Dee Dee made a high-pitched, rhythmic sound in the back of her throat. “And Marguerite would respond in kind. It was just a little singsongy call. But it was intimate, and sweet. Being in the house so much, you found out all these little habits they had. It was endearing.”17
Sometimes when Dee Dee came to care for Grace after dinner, she would find the two women lying together on the bed in Marguerite’s room. In 2005, she recalled the first occasion: “I went at my regular time, early evening, to bathe Grace, do her dressings, and so on, and they were in there reading out loud. I can’t tell you which one was reading. They smiled at me, read another few lines, and it was very natural, no embarrassment, just very, very natural.”18 A few years later, Wilson commented, “There they were, you know, snuggled in the same bed side by side, reading a book, sharing a book. What could be more beautiful? . . . It was a lovely, loving scene between two women who did have a love affair.”19
Dee Dee’s affection for Grace was all the more meaningful—and all the more unlikely—in that relations between the Wilson family and Frick had been strained for years when Wilson first became Frick’s nurse. They had reached the breaking point one day after an incident involving the Wilsons’ German shepherd. Dee Dee and her radiologist husband, Robert, had gone out for dinner one evening, leaving their six children in the care of young Elizabeth Kelley. When they returned, Dee Dee reported,
Beth was in a dither. Once again Grace had invaded our home and suggested things that should be done or weren’t done. What happened was, she’d gone around back and emptied the dog’s water dish and come inside to refill it at the kitchen sink. And she complained to Beth about how we didn’t take care of this wonderful dog, for shame, and quite frankly was certain that my husband was a vivisectionist. And all the children were around, . . . and my husband was infuriated to be called a vivisectionist!
In the windup, “Grace wrote a letter to him that didn’t apologize but alluded to the fact that indeed she did come into the house and may have said this. Doesn’t recall. And he forbade her to set foot on our property here.”20 And that is where things stood for a very long time between the Wilsons and Grace Frick.
Then one Sunday morning Dee Dee spotted Frick making her way slowly on foot past the Wilsons’ house on Rock End Road headed toward Union Church. Bent over as she was on account of her spine and her enormous left arm, her head bobbing up and down as villagers often recall, she looked so weary that Wilson offered her a ride, fearing that Frick would angrily refuse. Instead, she said, “Thank you very much,” and got in. As Dee Dee remembered, “That was the first contact I had after the dog episode. But she was willing to get in the car. In other words, she was very forgiving. . . . I hesitated as to whether to stop. Of course, I was so glad I did.”21
Wilson started seeing Frick professionally as a favor to Ruth Westphal, her colleague at the Northeast Harbor Nursing Service. Ruth had borne the burden of Grace’s dressing changes seven days a week in addition to her full-time job. Wilson agreed, though she did not think Frick would accept her in the house. “Well, I went in, and Grace was in bed upstairs. I said, ‘How are you this evening, Miss Frick?’ and she said, ‘My name is Grace.’ It was a wonderful breakthrough, and we became friends, and she was a wonderful patient. Sweet and funny and elfin-like and mischievous. And to think that she accepted me was to me quite exceptional.”22
Of the several journalists who came from Paris in the spring of 1979, one finally managed to find favor with both denizens of Petite Plaisance, and he returned it in kind. Over the course of only two days in mid-May, Jacques Chancel recorded everything he needed for a week’s worth of hourlong programs, and then some, to be broadcast in France the following month. It was with the sympathetic Chancel that Yourcenar for once publicly gave way to—or simply could no longer hide—her emotions with respect to Grace as she told the story of the Dutch translator who, many years earlier, had seen in Frick “the visage of fidelity.”
The most personally revealing—indeed, shocking—part of Chancel’s conversation with Yourcenar was never broadcast, however, no doubt because the author forbade it. But the exchange was published in a little volume containing a partial transcription of the Yourcenar Radioscopies. The conversation began when Chancel posed a question alluding to the death of Yourcenar’s mother and the unusual upbringing Marguerite had as a result. Yourcenar had heard far too many such questions, and she did not try to conceal her impatience:
M.Y. . . . I’ve forgotten nothing about the girl I once was, that Mademoiselle de Crayencour about whom critics constantly harass me. Like her, I can say about those who were around me then, and those who pester me still with their curious questions: I don’t love as they love, I don’t live as they live. I will die as they die. My end will not be a rupture, I am preparing myself for it. Besides, I have at my side the most exalting example of courage there could be, my friend Grace, my lifelong companion, who knows she is condemned to death. The cancer chips away at her, destroying her. Her hands are nothing more than little trees stripped of their leaves, yet she lives and she loves as if eternity were promised to her.
J.C. I profess my admiration. Rarely have I seen, or encountered, such an attentive friend. I can tell that Grace, at every moment, would like to offer us even more precious assistance, Grace who has already done everything within her power as a sick woman, but it is hard for her even to hold a simple cup of tea. And yet she never complains. And sometimes, pardon me, I am surprised by your cold indifference toward her, as if everything she does were your due.
M.Y. I could never have imagined that you would criticize me this way. That arrow straight to my heart is hard to bear, but we have agreed to be totally frank. You can be assured that I am never in a state of indifference, though I know that my voice and my carriage sometimes bear witness against me. I have a certain aptitude for uttering my words and raising my head. It is the old reflex of an old woman who has forged herself a carapace, of a lifelong reader who lives with ghosts. I may strike you as remote from daily matters, as taking refuge in a kind of arrogance. Yet I am sensitive to every detail, however slight or momentous. And Grace, to return to her, represents the essence of my life as a woman. Of course I will have to come back to my dear Zeno, in The Abyss, which I consider my best novel: “I am one, but multitudes are in me.” Grant me the possibility of losing my way.23
That Yourcenar’s conversation with Chancel should have taken such an unlikely and circuitous route from an allusion to the loss of Fernande de Crayencour to an acknowledgment of Frick’s utter centrality to who Marguerite Yourcenar was as a woman is a phenomenon about which one could write volumes. And this, not only because the author for once was able to verbalize in no uncertain terms the primacy of Grace in her life, even as the structure of the couple’s relationship was crashing into the abyss of Frick’s decline, but also because this passage shows that Yourcenar knew, though she was almost never able to admit, that her formidable self was built around a core of profound vulnerability. Yourcenar had indirectly revealed that vulnerability in the past, during the 1920s and 1930s, in such youthful self-reflections as the lost and lovelorn Pierrot or the moonstruck Sappho of Fires, “a trapeze artist, too winged for the ground, too corporal for the sky.”24 Grace’s multifaceted love for the woman and the writer in her partner is what made it possible for Marguerite to become “Yourcenar.”
Despite the unusual turn that her conversation took with Jacques Chancel, Yourcenar was very pleased with the interview overall. On May 14, 1979, she told Georges de Crayencour all about it and about Grace’s now almost continual suffering.25 Two weeks later, apparently forgetting her previous letter, she wrote again to her half nephew, “things are not running very smoothly here. The state of Grace’s health has gotten rather worse since the beginning of the year, and there are times when she experiences quite a lot of pain. But her energy never gives out completely. She spent part of the night Saturday to Sunday making a great loaf of bread worthy of the finest baker.”26 Yourcenar also reported to Crayencour again on her sessions with Jacques Chancel.27
On July 20, according to Yourcenar’s journal, a new phase in Frick’s illness began. It was around that date that her bouts of nausea became more frequent and that Grace began refusing most nourishment and drink. Only with great effort could Marguerite get her partner to consume a few hundred calories and a quart of fluid a day.28 The time had also come when Frick began lashing out at the person to whom she had been devoted for more than half her life.
After one particularly difficult doctor’s visit in early August that year, when Frick had vomited once on the bed in the examining room and again in the car, she surprised Yourcenar and the driver, Mary Savage, by asking to stop at Rockefeller Gardens on the way home. Neither Marguerite nor Mary could imagine her having the strength to make the round of the large garden. Nonetheless, aided by a cane and by Mary, that is exactly what she did. Yourcenar, meanwhile, visited her favorite spots in the garden alone, paying her respects to the great cross-legged Buddha in the pines and placing an oleander flower she found on the ground in the cavity at the base of the statue. “During all this time,” Yourcenar later wrote, “Grace was taking her slow walk on Mary’s arm. She has more confidence in Mary than in me, now that the illness has lodged in her a kind of irritation toward me—and it didn’t begin yesterday. The doctors and nurses assure me that ‘it’s in the normal course of things.’”29
By this time Frick was taking methadone, a powerful sedative that caused her to sleep for long periods every day.30 Lacking strength for anything not utterly essential, she had given up most of her usual activities, epistolary, horticultural, literary, and administrative. Nonetheless, as Yourcenar noted in her journal, “she still dresses for the visitors who come, stops moaning in their presence, covers the sprawling crab on her neck with a large scarf and her open sternum, which constantly drips blood.”31 The great difficulty, as Yourcenar told Georges de Crayencour, was “to keep her nourished, which I am striving my utmost to do, not always successfully.”32
Frick did not share with her companion what she was thinking at the Rockefeller Gardens that day or her innermost thoughts about her plight. But she may have revealed them inadvertently one day. As Yourcenar wrote about Grace on August 3,
This afternoon, sitting on the veranda where she lay on a chaise longue, bundled up in a blanket and trembling with fever—I heard her murmur distinctly the word “Epilogue.”
“Why epilogue?” I asked in as steady a tone as possible.
“I don’t know. There is the word prologue. There is the word epilogue.”
And that was all. She fell back into her half-slumber.33
Frick’s ill humor toward Yourcenar got progressively worse as time went on. Everyone who was close to the couple remembers how kind Grace was to others throughout the last stage of her illness—and how unkind she was toward her companion.34 Dee Dee Wilson will never forget how shocked she was one day to hear Grace, whose bedroom she had entered to begin a change of dressings, scream at Marguerite, sitting quietly near her, “Get out, my nurse is here!”35 It did not seem to matter what Marguerite did to try to help or ease Grace’s suffering, it always seemed to go wrong. As Wilson once speculated about Frick’s treatment of Yourcenar, “People who are very, very ill turn on a beloved because they know that beloved won’t lash back at them. And so Marguerite, unknowingly, was a whipping post. It isn’t unusual at all, but it was very difficult. And Marguerite was very hurt and bewildered and tried all the time to make her comfortable. . . . Marguerite was just defeated, no matter what she tried to do.”36
Shirley McGarr, in a similar vein, remembered the time Marguerite called her to come by if she wanted to see Grace while she was still well enough to enjoy a neighborly visit. McGarr came right over, climbed the steep main stairway just inside the front door, and turned left into her friend’s bedroom. Grace’s face lit up with pleasure at the sight of her, then instantly contorted with anger: Marguerite had followed Shirley into Grace’s room.37
To me Mme Yourcenar once described Frick’s state of mind toward the end as a kind of murderous fury. Shirley’s husband, Elliot McGarr, had told me a story one day in 1985 about Grace asking him to get rid of a pair of red squirrels that had moved into Petite Plaisance. According to McGarr, Yourcenar hadn’t known about the operation in advance and she was angry when she learned of it. But that was not at all the case, according to the author herself. “I remember that episode very well,” she said. “It revealed to me a fundamental brutality in Grace Frick—she was already ill—that I had never been aware of before. It was a kind of killing rage, the way they were enraged against the Jews. But perhaps she could find no better way to vent her own rage against death than to unleash it on those two red squirrels.”38
By mid-October, Yourcenar was describing Frick to the solicitous Georges de Crayencour as having lost all sense of time and place, needing oxygen to breathe, and no longer capable of reading the lovely letter that Crayencour had written her. “Perhaps it is good,” she wrote to her half nephew, “that a being should cast off all moorings before departing, but the awful thing here is that the worse the illness gets, the more she wants to live, denying even that she is ill, or continually asking, like a child, why she is suffering. Neither the nurses nor I know what to say, realizing that she does not have the strength to face the facts as they are.”39 But Dee Dee Wilson strenuously rejects the idea that Frick had lost touch with reality.40 “She was always in her right mind,” Wilson has insisted. “Anyone as ill as Grace would bitterly complain and even deny their illness, and say, ‘Why me?’ It’s all normal.” What she did have very late in her debility, however, was the implausible conviction that somewhere in North America she could find a treatment that would cure her. When Marguerite and Dee Dee broke the news to her together that there was no more hope, she was furious.
Grace died on a Sunday, November 18, 1979, after two or three days of drifting in and out of consciousness. For a week or two, one of the nurses had been staying overnight so that Marguerite would not be alone with her. Dee Dee was on duty that evening, and she knew the end was near. The two women sat side by side next to Frick’s wooden bed, its tall headboard adorned with a painted scene depicting an ancient sailboat with a bird’s-head prow heading into port, its white sail catching the wind. The room was quiet except for the sound of Grace’s shallow breathing. As hearing is the last sense to go for the dying, Dee Dee urged Marguerite to speak to Grace. Instead, the author got up from her chair, walked down the hall to her own room, and came back with a small round music box made of cherry or another dark wood. Marguerite wound it up and played Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks by Richard Strauss, holding the device close to Grace’s ear. When the notes ran out, Yourcenar rose from her chair, took the music box back to her bedroom, and resumed her vigil at Frick’s bedside.41
According to Dee Dee, a great lover of opera and classical music who remembered Frick’s death in vivid detail, Grace had given the music box to Marguerite. As a gift it was particularly apt, since the many tales about the folk hero Till originated, like Frick’s ancestors, in medieval Germany then made their way into the Flanders of Yourcenar’s paternal lineage.42 Musically, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks is a kind of duet, featuring the interaction between two primary instruments, a horn and a clarinet. The piece also contains sections suggestive of a galloping horse—Till is often depicted in the tales as riding through the countryside on horseback, as Grace herself so loved to do. It is hard to imagine a more fitting musical accompaniment to the final moments of “the lady on horseback” who once rode all over Mount Desert Island searching for, and finally finding, the house in which she now lay dying.
Like the last tinkling notes of Strauss’s tone poem, Grace’s respirations slowed and finally came to a stop. Dee Dee removed her oxygen mask. The ordeal was finally over. Following the ancient folk tradition, Yourcenar went to one of the windows overlooking South Shore Road and the sea, opening it wide to set Frick’s spirit free. “Grace was just lovely when she died,” Dee Dee remembered with affection. “All the pain and suffering left her face, and she looked like a beautiful young girl. Her face just got younger and younger. She was transformed after the long years and even more grueling final weeks of suffering.”43
Marguerite Yourcenar had accompanied her partner through every crisis of a decades-long illness. With the help of three devoted nurses who all became dear friends, she had also accomplished the admirable feat of making it possible for her to die at home, in her own bed, in the presence of love. Ruth Westphal, whom Dee Dee had called to say the end was near, arrived right after Frick died. Then came Dr. W. R. Horner to certify the death. Ruth remembered how good Dr. Horner had always been with Grace and how kind it was of him to come out that night and “pronounce her” in person.44 Then the funeral director and his assistant arrived from Somesville. They covered Frick’s body with a sheet and strapped her to a stretcher for the precarious climb down the steep stairway leading to the front door. Marguerite followed the body down the stairs and to the hearse that was waiting out front. Finally, Frick’s third regular nurse, Ella Young, arrived from Seal Harbor to spend the night with Marguerite, who, as Dee Dee said again and again, “could not be alone, simply could not be alone.” “Many, many, many nights” would go by before Yourcenar would be able to spend the night alone at Petite Plaisance.45
Here is what she wrote in the daybook that evening, and over the next few days:
November 18, 1979 (Sunday)
The death (9 o’clock in the evening beneath a beautiful starry sky)
November 23, the ashes are returned to the earth on a beautiful misty, sunny morning
November 26, the memorial service.46
There would be no embalming of the body and no viewing. Grace Frick’s remains would be cremated and her ashes buried in the small cemetery next to the cottage where she and Marguerite had spent their first summers on Mount Desert Island. In the obituary she wrote for the Bar Harbor Times, Yourcenar called Frick “a brilliant and accurate translator” who would be “remembered for her translations of ‘Memoirs of Hadrian,’ ‘Coup de Grace,’ and ‘The Abyss,’” adding that “many will remember even more her generosity, her kindness and deep sympathy for all she met and knew, her interest in humanitarian, environmental and educational causes and her courage in her long illness.”47
Ruth Westphal remembered the burial. Except for the undertaker Tom Fernald, who had dug the small hole for Frick’s ashes in advance, only she and Dee Dee were present at the cemetery with Yourcenar. “Madame had an Indian basket, and she lined it with a silk scarf. She and Grace always saved rose petals, which they kept in a wooden trough at the top of the stairs on the right-hand side. It was like a little tradition. Whenever they got roses, they put them in there and saved them. And she spread rose petals in the basket, and then we put the ashes in.”48 Marguerite then scattered a handful of petals into the grave, wrapped the sweet-grass basket in silk scarves, and lowered it into the hole. No one spoke. Once the hole was filled with earth, Marguerite Yourcenar raised her hand as if to wave and said simply, “Goodbye, friend.”