Mrs. Willoughby's Diary

by MARY ELIZABETH PLUMMER

1

MRS. PETER WILLOUGHBY dipped her pen into the Meissen inkwell on her desk and wrote energetically across the flyleaf of a 1941 diary, "’Each day, each week, each month, each year is a new chance given us by God.’” It was New Year’s Day, and she had resolved to keep a diary from now on; and not only that, but somehow to get her diary up to date — a large task, because she had not kept a diary since 1920.

“A great deal has happened since 1920,” Mrs. Willoughby said pithily to her husband, who lay prone on the sofa, reading Murder at Smutty Nose.

“ How true, ” said James Peter Willoughby. “I might also observe that much happened before that.”

There was silence for a few minutes in the Willoughbys’ living room on Sutton Place South. Then Jim remarked, “Lizzie Borden’s dead,” and turned a page.

Mrs. Willoughby rested her fair head on a slim white hand, and thought about various things that had seemed important for a while in this country in the last two decades — such as the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill. She tried vainly to recall its provisions.

“I have a slight headache,” said Mrs. Willoughby. There was silence from the sofa. “I shall never again stay up until 3.00 A.M. on New Year’s Eve,” she said. Silence again. “Jim, dear,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “if you were going to summarize briefly everything that has happened to you and me since 1920, how would you go about it?'’

“It would depend on what audience I hoped to reach,” said Jim. “I am going to take a nap.” He departed in the direction of the bedroom.

Left alone, Mrs. Willoughby thoughtfully studied her right foot, in its light-blue satin boudoir sandal, and considered her problem. In order to get her diaries up to date, she would have to write an essay hitting the high spots: her marriage, the birth of her children, the most memorable things she had read and heard in her adult life, and something of her intellectual and emotional development.

She dipped her pen once more, and wrote across a sheet of blank paper a tentative title for this treatise — “Twenty Years in New York: A Montage.”

Enervated by this effort, she sat back in her chair and gave herself over to recrimination for having permitted all that time to seep away unrecorded. She had lived a rich, full life in a very significant period of the country’s history. By now, a simple dayby-day account of her doings in those years would comprise twenty diaries. They would have been a reservoir of material on which to draw for background for her future projects; a satisfaction for her old age; a heritage for her children. Perhaps at some future time, when the current of interest flowed back from events abroad to life at home, they might even be worthy of publication in an abridged form — THE JOURNAL OF JANET WILLOUGHBY: Life of a Sensitive, Thoughtful New York Woman of the Nineteen Hundreds.

There were few, if any, published diaries of New Yorkers who had remained at home and who never had held a job of any kind, thus having a free mind to contemplate and judge critically various aspects of New York life. Hers would have filled a real need. Perhaps she should make her paper a longer work, with subtitles, such as “A Résumé of My Life at Twenty-seven.”

She pushed back through the mists of memory, trying to recall some of her thoughts at twenty-seven, but didn’t succeed. That had not been one of her important years. This one, she knew, was going to be. At midnight, she had felt a sloughing off of her old, hedonistic self. She would be strong, purposeful; would staunchly perform tasks that she previously had put off until such time as she should really wish to do them.

“How sad,” she thought, “that so often on New Year’s Day one is ill-equipped to start carrying out one’s high resolutions!”

2

She felt so despondent, considering this matter in its relation to the general subject of man’s frailty and the difficulties of his arriving at a state of perfection, that she decided to refresh herself by dipping into her former diaries.

These were two old books which she kept in an ivory-colored box on a high shelf in her bedroom closet. She went in and extracted them from their box, returned and started to read with interest and appreciation.

The oldest diary was a small leather book which formerly had been locked, but which now had the lock cut. It dealt with Mrs. Willoughby’s life at seventeen. On the flyleaf were two adjurations: —

“Write books and plays.

“Avoid gossip. Low-grade intelligences always speak in personalities.”

The first pages were crowded. The account of January I overflowed to January 2, and contained several comments of a critical nature, including the observation that “L.G, is so stupid he is fascinating.”

The next day’s entry was an exposition of the attractions of “H.” “He is steadfast in his purposes,” she read. “He is foursquare.”

Mrs. Willoughby frowned with distaste at this description, and flicked over a page. On the next page she told of playing a phonograph record of a popular love song, which, she wrote, “seems almost as sacred as the marriage service.”

January 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16 were vacant. Under January 17 she merely had written, “A beautiful day.” January 18: “I have a new red coat with a gray squirrel collar.” After January 21 there was nothing until May 7. Busy entries followed through June 27, most of them detailing conversations she had had with Charles K., a man of twenty-one who had beguiled her greatly at that time. They had talked together a great deal, and she had written it all down. Here was the day when they had had that long, interesting talk about “X.” It was on a cloudy day in June. They had had this long, interesting talk, and then it rained. It poured.

The diary then skipped to July 4, and told how her father had enjoyed setting off the Roman candles on their lawn in Mount Kisco.

“July 5. — I do not want to be clever. I want to be understanding.”

“July 6.— I am a greater believer in limitless possibilities.”

There was nothing in the diary after that date.

“Well,” thought Mrs. Willoughby, “that is not a very full diary, but it is something. That year is not a complete blank, like my life at twenty-seven. It is something to be able to read these jottings about my life at seventeen and realize that I am not nearly so foolish now as I was then.”

The second diary was a red-backed National Diary, which had printed inside its cover the Postage and Parcel Post Rates for the United States and Possessions. In the first pages Mrs. Willoughby had noted various things that she was going to do, such as improve her personality, do more foreign and United States travel, and keep up and revive old friendships. Mrs. Willoughby was twenty at the time.

These notes took up to January 8. The makers of the National Diary had printed at the top of that page, “Battle of New Orleans. 357 days to come.”

Mrs. Willoughby’s major interest, on the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, had been to describe people she knew with a single word: the first word that occurred to her when she thought of them.

“Mrs. K. — ‘fecundity.’ ”

“Stephen J. — ‘efflorescence.'”

This labor had been abandoned after describing about ten of her acquaintances, and she had started listing in her diary the fortunes that she received, with her weight, when she stepped on a drugstore scale. The weight cards nearly all said 11G, but the onesentence character analyses were always different, and always, she felt, accurate.

“February 12. — ‘Weight 116. You have an inherent power for organization. Develop your abilities to the fullest extent.’”

“May 19. — ‘Weight 116. Your keen, analytical mind is of great assistance in solving the problems of others.'”

Scattered through the diary were observations and fragments with no quotation marks around them, but with a familiar ring. Under January 20 was written, “He taught her all she knew. It was as if she had grown up in his arms.” She did not know now whether this was a quotation, an idea for a story, or what.

July 14 set forth the idea that there’s always a moon in a certain town in Maine. “Sometimes it’s balmy with a moon, and sometimes cool with a moon.” Reading this now, she felt sure that it was something out of College Humor.

Another note said, “Take the great women of history.”

Why? She had no idea where this came from.

The diary was blank after July 14, except for the manufacturer’s printed reminder near the end: “Have you ordered your diary for next year?”

Mrs. Willoughby was still absorbed with this book when her friend Lolly Winters called and said it was time to go to Mrs. Valentine Sledd’s eggnog party. She put her old diaries back in their ivory box in her bedroom closet, and tucked the new one into her desk, with the unwritten paper entitled, “Twenty Years in New York: A Montage.”

3

The reason she did not get out the new diary when she returned home that evening and describe Mrs. Valentine Sledd’s eggnog party was that Mrs. Sledd’s party was simply too trivial. The rooms on Gracie Square were full of purposeless people screaming inanities, and Mrs. Willoughby was unwilling to deface her diary with their bromides. Tomorrow she would make a simple, austere note under yesterday’s date: “Eggnog with Mrs. Sledd.”

The next day, to her own surprise, she did this, and added an equally austere note for January 2: “Luncheon with Gretchen H.”Similar entries continued until late spring, by relentless exercise of her iron will. If she skipped a week, she went back the following week and wrote down something for each day, as nearly as she remembered it.

In the late spring, she and her husband spent a week-end in Williamsburg, Virginia.

“We saw the oyster fleet at Hampton Roads,” Mrs. Willoughby wrote in her diary upon her return. “We had Southern fried chicken, Virginia ham, black-eyed peas, and candied yam for dinner one night. Dessert — plum ice cream. There was an open fire in our bedroom.

“Our host had a beautiful old garden, with spice bushes and magnolia trees. There were catbirds and thrushes in the garden. We sat on the veranda and sipped scuppernong wine.”

Writing these things, Mrs. Willoughby began to feel like a Southern belle of the Spottswood period. A great languor came over her. She made no more entries in her diary until September 1, when the Willoughby family returned from a vacation in Maine.

Her interest in her diary was reawakened at this time by a couple of sentences she read at the start of the book, Since Yesterday: —

“Do you remember what you were doing on September 3, 1929?

“Probably not — unless you have an altogether exceptional memory.”

Mrs. Willoughby found this question very disturbing. “Jim,” she said to her husband, “what were we doing on September 3, 1929?”

“I have no idea,” said Jim. “Why do you want to know?”

“I was just thinking,” said Mrs. Willoughby. “I wish I had kept a complete diary for all the years of my married life.”

“What would you have written in it?" inquired her husband.

“I would have written all the delightful things you have said and done,” said Mrs. Willoughby fondly.

James Peter looked dubious.

“I would have quoted some of your impromptu rhymes,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “such as ‘Weary pilgrim, dressed by Milgrim,’ and I would have told how you used to sing in the bathtub, ‘Good morning, good morning, another day is dawning.'”

Jim smiled, but said, “I don’t remember doing that.”

“Of course you don’t,” said Mrs. Willoughby, “because you didn’t keep a diary.

“I also would have noted some of the interesting thoughts I had when I arrived at the hospital before Jane was born,” she continued.

“Too intimate,” said James Peter Willoughby.

“Such things make a very good diary,” said Mrs. Willoughby, inexorably.

“Among the things that I never have been sorry about is the fact that I have kept no diary,” said Jim, feeling that he had narrowly escaped being immortalized in his wife’s journal. “What if all the 120,000,000 people in the United States kept a diary? What a mass of material there would be, and for what purpose?”

For a moment even Mrs. Willoughby’s mind was appalled at this idea.

“Hundreds of thousands of diaries would fall into the wrong hands,” continued Jim. “The result would be chaos.”

Mrs. Willoughby’s spirits were somewhat dampened by this black picture, but her will, newly fortified by a holiday in the sunshine and sea air, was inflexible when she went to her desk and her diary late that evening, to pick up the loose threads of her life since the spring week-end in Virginia. She was dismayed to see how many blank pages there were, but pleasantly refreshed to read in her last entry about the oyster fleet at Hampton Roads and the catbirds in the garden, which she certainly would have forgotten had she not written them down.

How many delightful happenings had she let slip from her mind since then? Where had she been going, in her little Delman shoes?

Well, she would note some small things that she wanted very much to remember. Some of them had happened a good while ago, but they were valuable. They shed light on the fads and foibles of our time.

Mrs. Willoughby dipped her pen, and wrote a brief note about having seen a woman slap a man on the Madison Avenue bus, and how the whole bus had begun to argue the merits of it; but somehow the quality of the scene escaped her. She was unable to reconstruct it entirely. Then she told about seeing an old man on the street carrying a placard which said, “Watch your step, ladies. Love your husband and not somebody else’s,” and a man who had been gliding along on roller skates, walking his dog.

She followed these vignettes with some general observations on the pleasure of being back in New York after a holiday — “in order to see such surprising things as the above,” she added after a moment’s reflection, because the entry lacked unity.

Suddenly she felt very sleepy, and decided to call it a day.

4

Things moved apace now that Mrs. Willoughby and her friends were back in town. Worth-while activities presented themselves on every hand, and the crisis abroad went from bad to worse. Lolly Winters stopped designing houses to give full time to new duties, and named Mrs. Willoughby as chairman of a Means Committee. The minds of men and women were serious. Bernadette, the Willoughbys’ cook, affected by the tension of the times, dreamed that the sky cracked and the Lord came down.

There was no time for Mrs. Willoughby to keep her diary. Still, she had a great desire to get her little individual life, so fragile in this mad whirl of events, down on paper, coördinated, even as the claps of thunder sounded.

Thus it was that Mrs. Willoughby sat down on New Year’s Day of 1942 with her diaries, and thought about the lovely life she had had up to that date, and wished that somehow she could make clear how significant her life was, and the life of everyone else in the world.

She was in the incorporeal state of one who has had four hours’ sleep, and who recently has exchanged New Year’s greetings with utter strangers.

She glanced through her three diaries and said to herself that many of the entries were trivial and frivolous. Perhaps it was just as well that so many of the pages were blank. How, then, was one to make permanent the passing moment; how explain the importance of his little individual days before passing on forever?

Her task today obviously was to write a brief summarizing record of her life, which would relate the gravity of the present hour to the great hours of her individual development over the last two decades.

For a moment she was tempted to entitle this treatise, “My Favorite Hats and What I Have Done in Them,” because nearly all her great moments had come when she was wearing a memorable hat; but she dismissed this thought as unworthy, and wrote across a sheet of blank paper the title, “Twentyone Years in New York: A Montage.” She was still deep in thought when Lolly Winters called, and said it was time to go to Mrs. Valentine Sledd’s.

“I can’t go,” said Mrs. Willoughby, and hung up.

She crossed out “Montage" on her paper and wrote, “Conspectus.”