Tuesday, September 2nd

SUCH A TIGHTLY packed weekend … I shall never be able to sort it all out today. But there are things I must try to capture here this morning … a soft gray morning, well-suited to a quiet think.

Lee arrived Friday afternoon, a round joyful bundle of energy and excitement as she set out to try to find a house near here. We saw three or four that afternoon, ranging from a gloomy Spanish stucco house, lost in the woods (I could see it affect her like a pall) to Helen Jones’ exquisite one in the woods also, near here—a house I have admired and that I hope she can have. It is hard to describe how good it will be, if it works, to have a real friend so near by. Lee is wonderful in all ways I am not. Besides being a fine artist in mosaics, she knows how things work and loves to mend and make-go again, as she did with the cuckoo clock while I was gone. What fun to have a companion with whom to play! One of the few things I mind about living alone is having no one with whom to go to the movies, and I haven’t seen one for two years.

I left Saturday morning to drive to Connecticut to meet Irene Morgan at a motel and then go together to see Eva Le Gallienne in the play she has so wanted to play in, The Dream Watcher, being briefly tried out at the White Barn Theatre. One of the haunting woes of these past ten years has been to know that her genius was locked up for lack of a play. It has been real anguish, for time is running out. Le G. is seventy-six now, though one would not guess that. She is in full command of her powers and has more to say, perhaps, than she ever has; so that the immense technical expertise is simply there to be used for a great end. How I had hoped the play would prove worthy! But I did not feel it was.

It suffers from being a novel turned into a play … the author, Barbara Wersba, did the dramatization herself, and perhaps this was a mistake. The play depends on two actors, the old woman and a sensitive boy who is doing badly at school and needs “motivating,” as they say. Their conjunction is the action. Unfortunately, the boy, handsome in a plump little-boy way, did not have the necessary intensity. So the magic the play might have had simply did not happen. Le G. herself was magnificent, in a part that I felt almost too fitted to her—and that raised many thoughts in my mind. It seemed a kaleidoscope of bits and pieces of her great performances from Juliet to the Madwoman of Chaillot.

We went backstage for a moment and Le G. said, “But you’re white!” I had quite forgotten that she has not seen me since my hair turned from gray to white—and it made me laugh, as she used to call me “Granny” when I was seventeen and an apprentice at the Civic Repertory and spent hours in her dressing room while she made up. Now I am a real Granny!

The next day I went to Joy Greene Sweet’s to talk about Rosalind. Oh, what a rich time we had over that twenty-four hours! Long quiet talks, and then little visits with Gordon, her husband, who was in bed as the emphysema had flared up after some rather grueling days they had spent closing Rosalind’s house in Cambridge. Memorable meals—supper was trout caught by Gordon, New Zealand spinach (ineffably delicious), tiny potatoes just dug, these from the garden, and elderberry pie which Joy had made in memory of our summers at River Houslin in Rowley when we were children. The house is full of peace and light; every window looks out on long perspectives of lawn and magnificent trees.

After my nap we went for a walk around the place. They have worked for forty years to make wide paths through the woods (how rare in America, to be able to walk miles through woods in perfect comfort!), woods of white oak, maple, hemlock, and pine with wild dogwood and laurel below. All the way down I had been in a state of great praise for trees … wondering how I could ever live without them, thinking of their comfort, how they nourish and sustain us with their beauty and coolness, their steadfastness, the fact that they will outlive those who plant them. And I understood why old men plant trees.

Joy looks ten years younger than she did at R.’s funeral … of course, that was a dreadful time as she had flown back from California, leaving Gordon very ill. She said, among many things I want to remember, one thing that struck me where I live—that at our age (she is ten years older than I) what one needs and often lacks are “emotional peers.”

I got home to a warm welcome from Lee and Tamas … to find the house full of flowers she had picked and arranged, and all sorts of small jobs accomplished, and then we sat and talked and dreamed about the house she loves and hopes to buy, and the new life ahead.