PATTERSON TURNED FIFTY-TWO in 1958, in those days definitely middle-aged, more than middle-aged, certainly a far cry from today, when between sheer youth and senescence there appears to stretch an endless, mostly abstract zone of no age at all. In Patterson’s day a woman’s fifties was a time for “cutting back,” notably on “activities,” though in those balmy middle years of the American Century there were few fifty-two-year-old American women, at least in Patterson’s social strata, whose “activities” took them much beyond the bridge or canasta tables, or the country club, or shopping and the awkward, begirdled, high-heeled walking that went with it. As always, or whenever possible, Patterson marched herself to a different drummer. While growing up (granted, a lengthy process) as a child of privilege, she had known she was getting a free ride out there in the important world—the world of power, achievement, significance, that almost entirely male world—by hanging on to Poppa’s coattails. But over time, and with a little help from HG, she had made a place for herself in that world; she was now one of the very few women publishers, women newspaper editors, women chief executives—CEOs they soon would be called.
As such she took a growing pleasure in being “out there” in the big world, serving on boards, giving speeches, having her opinion sought and published. Equally she appeared to relish what was for her a fairly new activity: introspection, reflection, being alone with her thoughts. Increasingly she traveled south, disappearing into the riverine privacy of her woodsy acreage on the St. Mary’s, sometimes with the few friends who “got” the place, for instance George Abbott, the tall, lanky stage and film director with whom she liked to play her fiercely competitive, scramble-for-every-point brand of tennis, then shoot the breeze, drink whiskey as the sun went down. But mostly she went there on her own, happy to walk the woods for hours on end, with the company of Sunbeam, her golden Lab, trotting beside her through eye-filling stands of loblolly pine stretching in every direction; or out in the boat, usually late in the day, those flat pastel hours before sunset, humming upriver over the glassy coffee-colored water, past miles of mangrove, alligators sleeping on the banks, snakes and turtles in the shallows, keeping her sharp eyes alert for the cormorants, egrets, ospreys, blue and (ever-so-rare) white herons she loved to share the river with.
One of her friends described this period of her life as her Epictetus phase: Epictetus being the second-century Greek philosopher who evolved his own version of Stoicism, devotedly if selectively admired across the centuries by such as Marcus Aurelius, Voltaire, Matthew Arnold, J. D. Salinger. Patterson, a lifelong voracious reader (after all, expelled from boarding school at sixteen for having a forbidden copy of Anna Karenina), usually maintained a strong Pattersonian aversion to intellectual pretensions, as well as to being preached at or “improved”; nonetheless she had discovered Epictetus at the prompting of a professor friend, while sitting in at one of the early sessions of the Aspen Institute, and found as much to her surprise as anyone’s that the old Greek’s teachings spoke to her at a compelling level. As a result she now traveled everywhere with a volume of his Discourses near at hand, though after too many books lost or left behind en route, she eventually settled on a permanent copy she kept on the table beside her bed in Kingsland. But perhaps her attraction to Epictetus wasn’t really so unexpected; the ancient philosopher whose teachings advised against “complaining or making a public display of suffering,” who sternly described “grief and pity” as “acts of evil against the soul,” was really just another in a long line of voices she had been hearing since childhood, telling her to stop whining, toughen up, and get it together. At any event the little leather-bound volume of Epictetus’s Discourses remained with her the rest of her life, well thumbed, even underlined.