Wisely, Emily played to her own strengths. That September, based on the popularity of her distinctive articles, McCall’s magazine began to run a column called “The Post Box,” a series of questions and answers by Emily Post that would run through the first half of 1928. The “back page” of each month’s magazine continued to belong to the advice column of the austerelooking Mrs. Winona Wilcox, though the following year, she and Emily would alternate that position. Writing regularly for McCall’s was no small achievement—Dorothy Parker contributed as often as Emily, and Booth Tarkington, Carl Sandburg, Rudyard Kipling, and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald wrote occasional pieces as well.
During the December holiday season, within a month of Emily’s return from an early autumn trip overseas, a full- page ad in Vanity Fair showed the local linen guild proudly quoting an endorsement by Emily Post, who claimed, imperially, “We dine on linen damask.” For just twenty- five cents, the viewer could receive a booklet on the subject of setting a fine table, “its foreword written by the author of Etiquette.” In light of Emily’s typical simple dinner for one these days, along with her equally strong preference for simple language, her friends must have smiled at the royal “we.”
CHAPTER 45
THOUGH BY THE MID- 1920S IT WAS ALREADY A POPULAR VACATION spot for the well- heeled, Martha’s Vineyard, cold in the winters, remained a natural paradise for foxes and pheasants, dunes and marshes. Emily’s annual visits to Katharine Collier’s summer rental finally convinced her to buy her own house on what she had begun to consider an almost magical island. She had been looking for a replacement for Tuxedo Park for a while, and not just because of the humidity: her time there had passed. It was right for her sons’ generation to hold their own autumn balls these days.
At her leisure over the past few years, she had considered everything from the Morgan acreage in the Adirondacks to a seaside location on Long Island. Once she visited Katharine on Martha’s Vineyard, however, she knew she was home. Later she explained that her ancestral link to John and Priscilla Alden of Mayflower fame called her to Massachusetts. What’s more certain is that before making a final commitment, she ensured that her immediate family would cooperate: “She worked out a deal with my parents before making the purchase,” Bill Post recalls fondly. “I would spend every summer shuffling back and forth between Grandmama’s and my parents’, two or three weeks in Edgartown then the next ‘session’ at Tuxedo and so forth.”
The white- clapboard, green- shuttered cottage she finally settled on included a private beach about a quarter of a mile from her door on Fuller Street. Within view of the harbor, within walking distance of the village, the location was perfect for a woman unable to drive a car. Even the name of the real estate agent who sold her the property, Littleton C. Wimpenney, seemed scripted for the creator of Etiquette’s flamboyant characters.
The house had been remodeled several times already before she bought it. While tearing down the roof and the widow’s walk, Emily uncovered a piece of tile bearing the words “This house was reshingled in 1828.” Romantically, if inaccurately, Emily described the 1778 residence as an “old, gray fisher cottage, weather- beaten and squatty.” She loved how her new home balanced a sense of the timeless with the temper of the modern day, the island’s slightly stodgy reassurance anchored to the busyness of Boston, less than an hour and a half away by a pleasant ferry and car trip.
Most important, her son was going to help her renovate the entire house. She and Bruce spent the beginning of 1927 happily arguing over the best ways to update the friendly miniature farmhouse, so appealing that the young architect pushed her to travel to the island early, even before the season began. It was easy for Bruce to plead his case for an early departure as they celebrated his thirty- second birthday at the beginning of February: Manhattan was cold and bleak, the forecast predicting more of the same. Admittedly, it was cold near the water too, but at least they’d be able to get to work on the inside of their new property. He was pleased that he and his mother had one move behind them: he’d overseen Emily’s installment at her new co- op, the unpacking finally complete, including a cache of his clothes and favorite bedroom pieces as well.
But Bruce’s mother, excited to be updating Etiquette, was determined to finish the revisions due to her publisher first. She exulted in how perfect her life was just now: her public clamoring for more, her younger son at her side, about to help her rebuild her “new” home. This latest maternal excursion suited him well, she knew. He was impatient to get to “the other island,” as they had taken to calling Martha’s Vineyard, where he could begin work on his next project. Emily told Bruce he would simply have to wait a few weeks; he was acting, she said with a smile, much as he had as a little boy, begging to open his Christmas gifts early.
An abstemious, unmarried attractive man, Bruce was known for his friendships but not for any romance. If, as several elderly distant relatives have suggested, Bruce was gay, he would almost surely have remained closeted. He was no Oscar Wilde or Noël Coward, and he would have been horrified at the thought of humiliating his mother again, after what his father had done to her. Emily’s son loved her far too much to put his own desires first.
His sexuality would become a moot point. Just as Emily finally felt able to leave Manhattan, her son got a bad stomachache that refused to go away. Against his protests, she finally took him to the nearest hospital, where, on February 25, 1927, Bruce Post, the joy of his mother’s life, died from a ruptured appendix.
For the only time that anyone remembers, Emily Post faltered. Devastated by a grief she hadn’t imagined possible, she shut down. Though her surviving son alludes to this terrible sorrow in his memoir, he quickly passes it by, as if too hard even at a distance to relive—both the loss of his brother and his mother’s pain. “For weeks she was unable to realize it or accept it as a fact,” he quietly observed. A prominent obituary in the New York Times lauded “Bruce Price Post” as “high among the younger architects.” Over the last several years, Post had “given evidence of inheriting the talent of his grandfather, Bruce Price, who planned Tuxedo Park and designed many of the houses there.” A rising young star, already a member of the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, he had designed the New Colonial Hotel in the Bahamas and the Tuxedo Golf Club, closer to home. Bruce’s father went unmentioned.
Emily was too shattered to consider the irony that must have struck others: the best way for loved ones to tend to her now was to heed the counsel she herself had offered in 1922. The advice would never waver, unrevised from this first edition of Etiquette until her death:
At no time does solemnity so possess our souls as when we stand deserted at the brink of darkness into which our loved one has gone. And the last place in the world where we would look for comfort at such a time is in the seeming artificiality of etiquette; yet it is in the moment of deepest sorrow that etiquette performs its most vital and real service.
All set rules for social observance have for their object the smoothing of personal contacts, and in nothing is smoothness so necessary as in observing the solemn rites accorded our dead.
It is the time- worn servitor, Etiquette, who draws the shades, who muffles the bell, who keeps the house quiet, who hushes voices and footsteps and sudden noises; who stands between well- meaning and importunate outsiders and the retirement of the bereaved; who decrees that the last rites shall be performed smoothly and with beauty and gravity, so that the poignancy of grief may in so far as possible be assuaged.
She had learned from her parents’ deaths and from observing reactions of close friends to their own tragedies that grief skewed one’s equilibrium:
Persons under the shock of genuine affliction are not only upset mentally but are all unbalanced physically. No matter how calm and controlled they seemingly may be, no one can under such circumstances be normal. Their disturbed circulation makes them cold, their distress makes them unstrung, sleepless. Persons they normally like, they often turn from. No one should e
ver be forced upon those in grief, and all over- emotional people, no matter how near or dear, should be barred absolutely. Although the knowledge that their friends love them and sorrow for them is a great solace, the nearest afflicted must be protected from any one or anything which is likely to overstrain nerves already at the threatening point, and none have the right to feel hurt if they are told they can neither be of use nor be received. At such a time, to some people companionship is a comfort, others shrink from dearest friends. One who is by choice or accident selected to come in contact with those in new affliction should, like a trained nurse, banish all consciousness of self; otherwise he or she will be of no service—and service is the only gift of value that can be offered.
JOAN DIDION, IN The Year of Magical Thinking, identifies explicitly with Emily’s words about mourning. The unlikely pairing of Didion and Post was cited often in the impressive array of reviews showered on the bestseller, a winner of the National Book Award and a runner- up for the Pulitzer. Many journalists couldn’t understand why someone as edgy and postmodern as Didion chose Etiquette to succor her. Didion explained: she had been taught from childhood to “go to the literature” in “time of trouble,” and so she pursued everything she could find about death’s anguish: memoirs, novels, how- to books, inspirational tomes, The Merck Manual. “Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it,” Didion says. The one thing that spoke to her, finally, was the “Funerals” chapter in Emily Post’s 1922 blue book on etiquette. Only Emily Post understood the power of routine to hold one’s raw emotions at bay. Only Emily Post made suffering bearable.
“There was something arresting about the matter- of- fact wisdom here. [Post] wrote in a world in which mourning was still recognized, allowed, not hidden from view,” Didion explained. Like Didion herself, who wanted to “bring death up close,” Emily Post needed to acknowledge desolation as part of life. Her ability to confront sorrow in a straightforward manner seemed, to Didion, a success unmatched by other writing on the subject.
Didion remembered that her mother had given her a copy of Etiquette to sweeten a snowbound stay in Colorado during World War II. This time, in 2004, enduring another cold winter in a different era of her life, she could read it online in the solitude of her home.
WHEN HER SON DIED, Emily lost her bearings. Her suffering alternately numbed and roiled her for months, and then she fought to find her way back. From the few accounts of this period, Emily’s ability to carry on depended upon her filling every moment of her day. From developing her garden skills, to working crossword puzzles, to writing, to creating intricate models for her friends’ architects: she wanted no time to reflect. In addition to projects already under way, including reading the proofs for the first revision of Etiquette, she piled on new assignments, overextending herself in order to be saved. A decade later, she admitted that she had “worked with a furious concentration, taking on whatever jobs came along, until they often occupied sixteen hours out of twenty- four.”
Shrewdly, she figured out a way to keep her loss at bay while staying connected to those she had loved: through writing a textbook on architecture, she would instruct others in the “Bruce” tradition. That spring, while everyone around her talked of nothing but Charles Lindbergh squiring his Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris, Emily immersed herself in the libraries of her father and her son, creating from their volumes complex building diagrams and explanations. Though it professed to be the work of an amateur decorator, the book that resulted was a systematic compendium of architecture, enthusiastically detailing everything from color wheels to histories of furniture. Even as she paid tribute to them, Emily was now free to become her own version of the wide-ranging architects her father and then her son had been.
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CAUGHT UP IN her enthusiasm for this new book subject, Emily began rendering intricate replicas of houses she was helping remodel, using detailed cardboard constructions created from cigar boxes, decorating each room with diminutive papier- mâché furniture. If they suited the owners, she added tiger- skin rugs made of wax, with the stripes carefully etched. John Russell Pope, with his reassuring ties to her father, bought several of her models. Though Emily had meant from the start to produce the miniatures primarily as a hobby, her friends had insisted on compensating her, further confirming her status as a professional. She quickly discovered that prospective customers would “pay her plenty,” especially when she had to travel. Soon her architectural and design consulting skills became valuable enough that she started charging strangers for long- distance phone advice. During the next ten years, she would create twenty- five models.
Clients and architects alike enjoyed working with her. Without seeming overbearing or condescending, she employed a foolproof method of getting her way with both of them. An admiring journalist explained: “She tells them what she thinks and what she wants, quickly, in a level voice; and then, before even the most embattled antagonist has time to argue with her, she says, ‘you see, don’t you?’ leaning forward a little and speaking in a tone so suddenly warm and winning that there is no possible answer except ‘Yes, Mrs. Post.’ ”
But if her attention to architecture kept the departed close, she sometimes needed ways to avoid thinking about them entirely. Within a few months of Bruce’s death, Emily turned to a hobby she had occasionally indulged throughout her adulthood, gardening. This time, however, there would be nothing of the amateur about it. Fastidiously organized, her garden log reveals an obsessively detailed description of the grounds surrounding the house that she and her son meant to restore together; now the flowers she planted would be Bruce’s eternal flame. “Gardens are a blending of nature and artifice; they are the product of horticulture and architecture,” remarks the anthropologist Yi- Fun Tuan. Control over nature reassures uneasy souls, especially those, like Emily’s, in turmoil. Her garden would be the perfect monument to her son.
Used to small plots rather than to her current expansive outdoor environment, she asked friends how to proceed, but they tried to discourage her from undertaking such a large project, for which she had little background. Undaunted, she defended her plan: “Lots of people have grown flowers who have not graduated from a horticultural college.” She “read literally every book on gardening” that she could “beg, borrow, or buy.” Studying the elaborate grids, Emily created her own chart, “not only painted in color, [but] the plants grouped according to time of blooming, height, sun and shade requirements and type of soil.” Color began to dominate her vision: her main requirement was to avoid “egg- yolk yellow or turkey red, neither of which I can endure.” Red, her favorite choice for human- made items, seemed grotesquely unnatural and attention- seeking in nature.
Pausing during her workday, she often found herself eyeing a bold defector from her master plan:
I am drawn to a window—and there is a red flower standing out like a gash! Then out I go and pull it up. I go indoors, and from the window see the hole where it was taken out. Well, I’m not going to do anything about it! I sit at my desk and begin my day’s real work, but instead of seeing the words I write, I see the hole where the red plant was. Within fifteen minutes I am out of the house walking around the garden looking for something to transplant. Then the hole made by the flower that is moved has to be filled—and so it goes.
House and Garden editor Dominique Browning has poignantly explained how her garden rescued her after her marriage failed: “I took care of the garden, then the garden took care of me.” Gardening became her way “of digging into the new life—digging in for the long haul, connecting, committing to a patch of soil, rooting in and under and around and through it all.” For the first few seasons following her loss, Browning, like Emily, lacked energy to lavish on her new garden. “But the garden went on. A few more springs passed in the same sorry state, and then one day I noticed a profusion of weeds and decided to do something about them. . . . Enough to get by, enough to get going again.”
As if a stranger to her newly bountiful countryside, Emily emigrated to the outdoors. She was mimicking, unknowingly, the newcomers to the United States who had long used personal gardens, however small their piece of land, to re create the feel of their old lives and to offset the de -racination they inevitably experienced. Planting a square, however humble, but full of the same herbs and foods that fed them back home, kept the dis-possessed in touch with the lives they had lost. For Emily, whose child had been an aesthete, the planting of architecturally perfect grids of flowers was surely, if unconsciously, a potent way to connect with the land of her dead son.
Though new to gardening on such a large scale, Emily had the instincts of a survivor who intuitively knows what to do. Researchers at New York University Medical Center have measured brain- wave changes in a group of women presented with flowers; they were shocked at the rate of genuine smiles, as measured by brain- wave changes. The investigators claimed “never [to] get 100 percent in any experiment”—until now: patients at NYU’s Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine seemed “to forget about their pain” when spending time among the hospital’s flower beds.
As she assuaged her own pain, Emily reached out to connect with others. She took pleasure in delighting passersby with lively flowers in riotous bloom outside her picket fence. One day, however, it dawned on her that they were invisible to any spectator inside the gate; she and her servants could not enjoy them. Her new driver (like his predecessor, though far younger, also named John) took her to the town hardware store, where, newly determined to sponge sword- shaped leaves all over her side of the fence, she quickly decided to buy three colors of green paint. Several hours later, her house windows looked out upon a forest of painted foliage, replacing the previous starkness of the white wooden planks. Like Bruce Price designing skyscrapers—finishing all sides of the building instead of only those that showed—his daughter believed in considering the total picture.
Emily Post Page 34
