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70 •——— verso runninghead ———• ———— Chapter Six ———— Mugwumps and Oysters p Ireally got serious about turning my research into a book in the fall of 2009. By chance, the calendar for that year exactly matches the calendar days of the week for 1885, and this coincidence became a source of inspiration for me; it put me on Cora’s schedule. Each morning before sitting down to write, I would take my dog for his walk in a park near my house that overlooks the Hudson River and, undisturbed by phone calls and obligations, ponder what Cora might have been feeling or seeing on that same day 124 years before. (Of course her scrapbooks started in the fall of 1884 when she entered college, before she got the diary, so not all the dates in this story exactly matched my own writer’s time.) One crisp October day, I saw a small flock of late birds make a brave charge together out of a treetop in a swoop of dark silhouettes—or maybe they were just leaves blown high in circles against the cloudless blue sky. Cora might have paused to watch exactly the same beautiful sight as she was coming back to college from the cider mill on a Sunday. She was walking alone on October 19, 1884, through the deep ravine that cuts behind Vassar’s Main Building below Sunset Hill. All Vassar students were required to take an hour of outdoor exercise every day. Cora often walked with her friends, and these regular outings were a source of great pleasure to her, for the conversation as much as for the fresh air and exercise. On this particular outing, sad nostalgia replaced her usual high spirits, and Cora preferred to walk by herself, alone with her thoughts, which she recorded in her scrapbook: “My pleasant walk of 40 minutes. Leaves from my favorite walk, the glen Oct 19, ’84. Nothing but leaves on a Sunday in Autumn—nothing but leaves—nothing but leaves. The melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year. Plucked from my Sunday promenade, Oct. 19, Sunset Hill.” She bent down to pick up three golden beech leaves and at the next turn of the path, five or six red sugar-maple leaves. Cora’s faded, flat [ 70 ] •——— Recto Runninhead ———• 71 Page from Cora’s scrapbook: “Leaves, leaves, leaves, nothing but leaves.” 72 •——— verso runninghead ———• leaves crumbled in my hands as I opened her scrapbook the first few times. I missed them immediately. Small chips of nineteenth-century leaf still cling to the patches of glue she used, and stains on the page left by their veins and outlines show exactly what they used to look like, so I know what kind of trees they came from—beech, sassafras, and maple. Feeling guilty for my carelessness, I picked eight twenty-first-century leaves of the proper species on October 19, 2009, and pressed them flat, intending to replace them in Cora’s scrapbook. They did not strike me as a real substitute, so they faded in a little pile on the front hall table in my house until they became pale brown and wrinkled and, thinking of her long-lost melancholy, I threw them back outdoors. I have had to accept entropy in this project—things that Cora created will fall apart, no matter how hard I try to protect them. b Throughout the fall, Cora began to settle in to her studies in Vassar’s School of Music. “The object of the school is to give complete courses of musical education in singing, piano-forte and organ playing, to those who have the requisite gifts and are prepared to submit to the necessary discipline.”1 Run by the nationally prominent composer and conductor Frederick Ritter, the music school had its own, independent sphere of influence in the Calisthenium. This fanciful redbrick pavilion with an arched roof flanked by two decorative towers is still standing next to Vassar’s Main Building, although the interior has been completely altered and replaced by a modern arts and performance center. In 1884, a picture gallery and the painting studios occupied the upper floor, and on the lower floor of the building, the students had access to two dozen pianos in separate practice rooms, along with a library of fifteen hundred musical scores. Art and music students did not have to live at the college, and several local women musicians from Poughkeepsie, Highland, and other nearby Hudson River Valley towns enrolled...

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