Garland in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

[Life in the Garland Home, 1916]

[96] X [Life in the Garland Home, 1916] Isabel Garland Lord The Garlands moved to New York City in May 1916, first renting rooms at the Schuyler Arms before leasing a seventh-floor flat in July at 71 East 92nd Street. one of father’s most admirable traits was his enthusiasm for and appreciation of creative talent. Stephen Crane was one of his early discoveries, and all through his life he was generously promoting young literary talent. There was no professional jealousy in Father. The thing that counted was craftsmanship. The plays and fiction of the later years of his life filled him with distaste, with actual physical pain. What he would think of this era’s ugly output I would rather not imagine. It was about here that the Garland household was increased to five with the arrival at Christmas of a small, woolly-white Maltese terrier. She had a card tied to her collar with the inscription, “My name is Blinkie and I belong to Mary Isabel and Constance.” She was the gift of our friends, Dr. and Mrs. Fenton B. Turck.1 Connie and I detested her on sight. We didn’t want a dog. We didn’t want the chore of taking her down six flights of stairs four or five times a day. She would obviously yap and misbehave and fall sick, and intent as we were on our school and our planned careers, we felt we had no time for that sort of thing. But you couldn’t hurt the kind Turcks, so we dragged her home, quite literally, and dumped her on Mother’s bed, and there she stayed for eleven years. Inevitably, we all came to adore her. She was the daily pest we had anticipated , but, on the other hand, she was so bright, so high-spirited, so full of overflowing love that we succumbed. In fact, she became the center of our daily life, and her tricks and ways were endlessly endearing. Nothing escaped her. A box of candy brought by a beau and opened with in- [97] finite care in the drawing room would bring Blinkie charging the length of the apartment, curls streaming, red tongue quivering with anticipation. Blinkie loved everybody and in the end even Father gave in. I came home late one night and opened the front door quietly on a scene that twists my heart to this day. Daddy was sitting in half light before the gas log, a small, curly white mat stretched out ecstatically across his knees. His big, broad hand was fondling the long silky ears, and in a sort of tender, masculine croon he was saying over and over, “Was a little dorgie-dorgie. . . . Was a little dorgie-dorgie.” Interesting to think that while my father had a myriad pet names for his children—baby,daughtie,Mizabel,Mebsie,Conniekin,childababe,kidlets— terms of affection exasperated him. “Don’t call me dear!” he would charge fiercely. The same applied to darling , dearest, sweet, love—any of the fond words that flow so easily from us all in these days. I never heard him call my mother anything except Zulime, yet he was a warm, demonstrative man. Probably his dislike stemmed from the old stage days with their easy assumption of familiarity. Father was a formal man. Happy as Connie and I were in our school life, Mother was under more and more of a strain. The thing she had anticipated, dreaded, was ever present. New York was worse than Chicago, for it was the center of the American creative world. Everyone came through New York to be wined and dined, and night after night, there in the center of the Speaker’s Table , handsome and distinguished and competent in white tie and tails, was Father; and there, on the right of the guest of honor, Joffre or Tagore, Galsworthy or Stanley Baldwin, would be Mother, radiant in one of Aunt Lily’s or Aunt Irene’s cast-off evening gowns, looking as though she hadn’t a care in the world.2 If she hadn’t hated it so, she could have had a wonderful time. Father was pretty outspoken about it. “Your mother sits by the guest of honor and gets interesting talk. I get the dull wives.” Mother, herself, was not one of the dull wives. Gracious, sympathetic, and witty, she tried to pass on her technique to Connie and me. “Find out what they are interested in and ask...