Free Woman of Valor by Ellen Chesler Page B

in Long Island Sound, but generally showed up with the intention of staying a month and then found some reason to leave early, though never without first playing endless card games, where she endeared herself to the children by letting them cheat and pretending she didn’t notice.
    It was Stuart who remained in Tucson, built himself a successful practice in internal medicine, and wound up taking care of his mother. He and Barbara built a house on a piece of property just several blocks away from hers, which Noah had wisely purchased before his death. They saw each other every Sunday for lunch, and became devoted fans of the dishes prepared by Margaret’s Mexican help. Sometimes Margaret did the cooking herself, experimenting with exotic cuisines like Indian curries, which the children did not always appreciate. But she redeemed herself afterward by having them stage an elaborate play of their own invention, complete with costumes and props gathered from her many travels all over the world. She was always the director, and children from all over the neighborhood participated, with their parents gathered in her living room to watch. 13
    Beyond family, Margaret was drawn during these years to a circle of artistically inclined refugees from the East, who like her had settled in Tucson because of its natural beauty and easy climate. Leigh-ton and Catherine Rollins, two carefree retirees from Massachusetts, became favorite friends whose small theatrical ventures she helped finance in what would become a careless pattern of generosity to favorite companions and causes that Stuart and Barbara found especially unsettling. Through them and Dorothy McNamee, the owner of a local bookstore, she also met a young and commercially successful landscape painter by the name of Hobson Pittman. Though twenty-one years younger than she, Pittman was attracted by what he once called Margaret’s “exuberant gaiety,” and they began a casual love affair that lasted for six years and included many romantic weekends back East and to Europe. Pittman was witty, charming, and childishly devoted, and much to the chagrin of friends who were shocked by the disparity of age, Margaret kept up the relationship. Surviving letters profess a lighthearted love, but never anything too serious. There is one confession to Dorothy Brush that Hobson was fun to know, “but not for keeps.” Another to Anne Kennedy, who’d remained a loyal correspondent since the early days at the American Birth Control League, confesses that, although some sort of “permanent companionship” might be possible, it was hardly worth the press it would invite. Brush, who had left her second husband, Alexander Dick, and was torturing herself over a married man, marveled at the ease with which Margaret began and ended affairs, and the freedom she extended to all of her lovers.
    The two unattached women traveled extensively together during these years. They spent one long winter holiday together in Tucson, another in Haiti, and vacationed during the summer at Dorothy’s ocean-front estate in Bridgehampton, New York, where they were sometimes joined by Juliet Rublee.
    â€œThey said that David & Jonathan had a love ‘passing the love of women,’” Dorothy wrote Margaret after one such expedition. “Well I love you passing the love of men, I really do…no one has ever understood me as well as you do, or been as dear & patient & kind & considerate & thoughtful.” Margaret’s affections were no less genuine, but the friendship became even more valuable to her when Dorothy’s easy access to money financed one last venture for birth control. 14
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    Eager to be back in the public eye, Margaret had hosted a well-publicized cocktail reception for Eleanor Roosevelt when the former First Lady visited Tucson in March of 1946. Two months later, she was back in the papers again when she made a two-week cross-country tour of family