Dearest Wilding by Yvette Eastman Thomas P. Riggio

Author:Yvette Eastman, Thomas P. Riggio [Yvette Eastman, Thomas P. Riggio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812216462
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 1998-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

He and his song were so touchingly sweet and old fashioned to me, as though I had taken a step backward into the nineteenth century. For breakfast in Brattleboro he surprised me again by ordering pork chops and mashed potatoes, a thing I thought to be just as improper as I once thought making love in the daytime was.

Often when I fell into a mood of being sick of my job, wanting to make a change, TD tried to help me with suggestions and letters “To Whom It May Concern,” affirming his consideration of my services and judgment to be valuable. Once, referring to my “always looking for some entrance to the stage,” he even suggested that I go to see an actor called Davenport who ran a free theater. Actors were not paid, but a voluntary collection was taken to cover minimal expenses. Of course, for me to consider this as a stepping stone to my “opening night” was out of the question as was his “tip” about a French perfume concern offering fifty dollars a week for a bilingual receptionist to greet incoming buyers. “If you . . . went down looking your smartest you might pick it up,” he said.

Despite our continued relation, other parts of my life intruded. A year and a half after their marriage, the climate between my Margaret-mother and Ken—who were far apart temperamentally and in their way of looking at things—fluctuated between storm and lull, each aggravating the other the while he and I became sharply conscious of each other. I was drawn to his sensitive, reckless, amusing self, attracted by his grace, by the way he laughed comfortably out of affection, by a slow-curved empathy that arched an enfolding tenderness. For his part, he perceived me, he said, as “a quiet green young moon in the background.” In one of her overemotive seizures, Margaret helped Ken lose his job as head of the New York bureau of the Canadian press when she telephoned his boss in Canada to ask him to discipline Ken for drinking. Their large gloomy apartment was now full of debts and fears: Margaret without work as a designer but trying at home to perfect her invention of a hand weaving loom, Ken trying to write short stories in hopes of selling, and Sue out of work. I became the mainstay, supplementing Ken’s occasional earnings from short-lived temporary work writing publicity for the March of Dimes and for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidential election campaign. When I asked TD if he would meet and talk to Ken, he said he would be pleased to and would suggest what he could. After they met, he wrote me to say that he liked Clark very much. But he thought him too depressed to impress himself on anyone in a position to help him.

Things eventually improved for Margaret and Ken when he got a job as a feature writer on the Toronto Star in Canada, and Margaret, having perfected and patented her

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