Authors: Nancy Milford
4
Around the time she met Elaine, Vincent won the lead role in Vassar’s Sophomore Party Play. The college set great stock by its plays, and she was to be the princess. She wrote home, “
You don’t know really how important it is to be a big thing in Sophomore Party. All the Freshmen will know me as the Princess afterward. And some of the Juniors are ushers, so they’ll be there. And all the faculty.” At the end of October the rehearsals were almost over and “I’m the whole show!—Guess if I enjoy myself!” she crowed. She’d seen her costume, all white cheesecloth with glittering golden ornaments, but in the end she didn’t have to wear the skimpy cheesecloth; someone gave her a swath of white satin from which she made her own Maxfield Parrish dress.
After it was over even the
Faculty
congratulated me, and the girls,—I can’t
tell
you the things they said, but its been a wonderful thing for me. Everywhere on campus now I meet people who say “Hello, Princess!” & yesterday, actually, in the laboratory, with many girls experimenting all around us, Professor Saunders came up to me & said, “How
is
your Royal Highness this afternoon?” And then he said, “I want to thank you for what you did for us Saturday. It was very lovely.”
The news from home now was always in striking contrast to her life at Vassar. When Norma wrote to her that fall, she said Camden was “
dead, worse than it ever was before.” Their bills haunted her, and the only good news was Vincent’s. “You must keep your great long name before the public all the time, dear. Now’s your chance.”
You must be about as important as any thing around there about now, with your big poem and everything else they know about you. Oh Hon, don’t think I don’t appreciate everything about it, even the title you are to have. Princess!! Please have your hair down. Of course you will any way. Unless it’s done way up—ever so high and all bound around some how.… Then there will be all those wonderful tall girl-boys for you to abuse as suitors.
Around this time, Vincent’s good news began to include Kathleen. It looked as if Miss Dow would become actively involved in securing a fellowship for Kathleen. In a postscript to one of Vincent’s first letters home that fall, she said Miss Dow had asked to see Kathleen’s work and, referring to her drawings, suggested that Kathleen send her “
two or three of her best things.… Aunt Calline is really awfully interested.” If only, she said, things might “come true for her as they have done for me!”
The next month, after a pitiful letter from Norma, Vincent said that Kathleen, at Vassar, would “
probably make more out of it than I ever shall here. I get too tired,—not
get
too tired, but
remain
too tired—to have any ambition or any gratitude, or any enthusiasm for other people’s plans.”
Although Miss Dow was still sending her boxes of other people’s clothes, they weren’t in style, and Vincent quickly complained of feeling “shabby.” “Who ever is seen now in a corduroy suit,—for best?” But when Miss Dow wanted to know if they’d do, “of course all I can say is that they
will
do. What wouldn’t I give for a good-looking
new
suit and a winter dress!”
Deprivation was of course a question of perspective: no other undergraduate at Vassar was having her poems printed in
The Forum
. Arthur Hooley had taken two. “The Shroud” appeared in the October issue and “Sorrow” in November. Her sisters wrote a parody of the latter’s last stanza. Vincent had written:
People dress and go to town;
I sit in my chair.
All my thoughts are slow and brown:
Standing up or sitting down
Little matters, or what gown
Or what shoes I wear.
Kathleen called theirs “
Hunk’s & my latest efforts in your line”:
Guess I’ll dress and go to town,
Not sit in my chair.
Shall I wear my suit of brown
Or my flimsy woolsy down?
Little matters or whose gown
Or whose shoes I wear!
By February, after almost the entire winter without a word from Vincent (except for a quick stint at home after visiting the Rallis at Christmas), Cora wrote:
Let’s have a cup of tea and talk it over.… Kathleen has had word from two of the three people about the … scholarship, asking her what she had decided, and the poor child does not know what to write them. I don’t see how it could be managed yet when the scholarship covers nothing but tuition.
When there was still no word from Vincent, she wrote again, just before Vincent’s twenty-third birthday, “
Why have we not heard from you? Kathleen can have the Coe fellowship, if I could manage the rest of it. We are trying to see some way out, but she must let them know very soon.”
Then she closed her letter with a “Goodbye for the twenty-two and howdy to the twenty-three girl I love. Mother.”
Finally, Vincent wrote to her “Dear darling adored Family” on March 8, 1915. Her news was entirely about her performance as Marchbanks in Shaw’s
Candida:
A great many people said I made them cry. And certainly in other places I made them laugh.—It’s a queer part, you know, of a boy of eighteen, a poet, terribly sensitive to situations and atmosphere, in love with the wife of an English clergyman.… I had a dark blue Norfolk coat and dark blue trousers that fitted me perfectly and a tan soft shirt and black tie tied in an artist bow—long ends, you know—and those old brown rubber-soled shoes I had last summer & black silk stockings. Everything fitted me perfectly and I felt
perfectly
at home in the clothes. People told me I reminded them of their brothers the way I walked around and slung my legs over the arms of chairs, etc. Instead of a wig I had my own hair bobbed. There’s a girl who does it wonderfully … just a little long in the back like a poet’s—and it grows beautifully like a boy’s around my face, you know.
On her birthday, Elaine had sent her a great armful of roses, “big tan-pink roses mixed with pussy-willows,” and for the play she’d filled her room with daffodils and given her a corsage of pansies so that it seemed always in bloom even in the deepest winter months. Then Vincent told them what everyone else had said about her acting:
Somebody never saw a girl before who could act so much with her mouth and neck and hands—somebody thinks I’m the best amateur actor she ever saw—somebody never knew anybody before to hold the facial expression so beautifully all the way through—(I suppose she meant I didn’t
sag
out of my part, or laugh when people at my side cracked jokes and the audience roared)—somebody hates me because I made her cry.
She saved the best for last: “Somebody says my voice was wonderful and has in it the quality that makes the audience pay absolute attention to what I’m saying—(I know that. I can always
hold
them when I speak, I find.)” That last somebody was Elaine, about whom she added, lightly, “Elaine & I have been living at the Inn lately, it seems”; she closed this letter, her first in months, by asking, “How is Mother?—Please tell me in detail.”
Norma would have none of it. She wrote sharply to Vincent on March 16, “Dear Vincent, please pay a little attention to this in spite of all your
busyness
. Mother is sick.… I have to wash her face & hands & comb her hair & help her up stairs to the bath-room and every little thing like that.”
She was, Norma said,
the most impatient of her illness of any one I ever saw. Talks about it all the time and really I don’t think she thinks we do anything for her.… I’m not doing this to frighten you ’cause she is lots better and has no temperature and her pulse is alright but you must write her a letter once in a while.…
When we
did
get a letter from you Mother made the remark “All she said about me was to ask how I was—no other special message—and the letter wasn’t even to me.” Please address your letters to her once in a while. You might as well know what she says—Wump and I get it all the time.… Mother said it seems as if you have gone right out of her life … and if Kathleen goes next fall she will probably be the death of me.… You will remember when you went back you were going to send Mother some of the money she lent you. I believe she gave you all she had but you have never even
mentioned
it. How easily you forget.
That was harsh. But since Cora wouldn’t hear of Kathleen’s working—she was to study to have her chance—that left Norma holding the fort. She’d asked her aunts to help her find work in Boston as a milliner, but
they wanted her to stay closer to home. “I’d go anywhere I got the chance. Mother is over her nursing I guess—We will owe three months rent the first of April and they have been making a deuce of a fuss over it.”
She was happy to type Vincent’s poems, and she suggested very firmly that Vincent must send them out if there were any chance of having them taken. Then she told her what to do: “Write Mother once a week whether you do anything else or not. Burn this letter please and don’t hate me for writing it. Much love, Norma.”
That did the trick. Vincent wrote to her mother as soon as she got Norma’s letter, defending herself against her sister’s accusations, in a letter which is as revealing for what is withheld, as for what is not:
Beloved, beautiful, sad, sick Mother,—
I love you. I love you. Don’t be sad any more. I’ll take care of you, way from here. I remember how you used to rock me and sing to me when I was sick and sad. And now I’m going to make you better by telling you some lovely things all about yourself.
First:
—Of all the songs I sing,—and I sing often now to crowds of people who love my little songs—the one they seem to love best is your beautiful “I may not dream again.”
But she did not promise to come home, or to write more frequently. The following fall would be Vassar’s fiftieth anniversary. Plans were under way for “a tremendous celebration. And your daughter has made the part of Marie de France in the pageant, a lovely part.… Give my love to my sisters, my mother. Your daughter, Vincent.”
She told her mother she was trying for a scholarship for the following year, and she thought she’d get it.
If I don’t get it I can’t come back here, very likely. But if I don’t come back I can get a good job somewhere and help at home. One reason why I’ve been doing so many plays and things here is so that the college will want to keep me. The faculty were all crazy about my
Marchbanks .…
So, just now, I am notorious, the best known girl in college. It all helps, too.
But if she was notorious, it was not just because of her acting or her poems.
On April 12, 1915, with only eight more weeks of school, she wrote her mother:
Elaine is going to ask her mother if she can come to Camden in the summer and
board with us!!
She knows all about us. Her people don’t, but she does. And I told her like as not she wouldn’t get anything to eat. But she says she can live on grape-nuts and salad. She would hire a sail-boat and have a real time. Of course it’s a crazy idea and probably her mother wouldn’t let her anyway.
But she did. “The two of them seem to have made all arrangements without consulting the mothers about it,” Daisy Ralli wrote to Cora,
and I am wondering whether it will be convenient to you to keep Elaine for the length of time she wants to stay. I feel that it will be an imposition on you unless you will allow me to pay her way. I know that she is a spoiled child and an extravagant one, in the bargain, and every additional member of a household adds to the expense. So please let me know how much I ought to contribute.
Elaine would come as a paying guest, and while it would be a mistake to suggest that money lay at the heart of their relationship, it did enrich it. When Kathleen wrote to Vincent earlier that spring and said, “
I think Elaine is a perfect dear—we’d die if it wasn’t for her, and so would you, I guess”—she’d meant money.
In June, her exams behind her, Vincent stopped by the Rallis’ in New York, waiting for Elaine to accompany her to Maine. She wanted to be sure that Elaine’s first impression of all of them in Camden would be exceptional.
Girls
, I want you to be all beautiful when we get home. Not too gorgeous, you know. Just shirtwaist & skirt,—simple, you know, and your hair all
simple
, Non, not frizzed & false. You see at college, no one ever
hears
of false hair. And don’t be
too
powdery. Please excuse me. Wump, you see to it that Non is not too artificial, and Non, you see to it that Wump is not too much in earnest about anything. And both see that Mother is particularly beautiful. Fix her hair lovely, Non, & have everything she wears just as
dainty
as possible, because I want Elaine to fall in love with her, & first impressions mean so much.
She even fretted about the smell of the house: “Burn something so it will smell all
homey
, coffee or a cigarette, you know. And if you have
anything
Djer-Kiss
*
about the house or anything that even remotely suggests it,
drown
it!!! This is no joke. It makes me sick to vomiting.”