Read Online Woman of Valor by Ellen Chesler - Free Book Online

misspelling her name. There was no federal money, and no broad institutional support, for the kind of expanded domestic health initiative she envisioned. All available health-care funds were being channeled to serve the troops abroad. Ironically, the greatest interest in her ideas came from the left, and after the The Daily Worker published an article she wrote on these subjects, she received a friendly middle-of-the-night phone call in Tucson from her old radical friend Marie Equi. 2
    The only real passion Margaret ever seemed to muster for the war effort derived from her hope that the Allies, if victorious, would punish the Roman Catholic Church for its apparent collusion with Mussolini and the Fascists. H. G. Wells shared her intensifying paranoia about the ties of the Vatican to the Axis powers and about the divided loyalties of American Catholics, who were in a position to influence the Roosevelt Administration’s foreign policies. In 1943, Wells wrote Crux Ansata , a short polemic recapitulating an intellectual critique of Catholicism and its irrationalities that he had first published in his Short History of the World . He also then went on to pose the thorny question of why Rome was being spared Allied bombing raids that were pummelling other European cultural capitals. Published on both sides of the Atlantic, the book sparked a biting controversy and provided the basis of the last surviving correspondence between Margaret and H. G., who died in London in 1946, also just short of the age of eighty. 3
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    With the passing of some of her dearest friends—with the world wholly absorbed by the war—Margaret made the personal decision to “stick out” her marriage, as she blithely characterized the nature of her intent in a journal entry for 1940. She also observed that Noah had mellowed a bit, once he got used to having her around more, and she was finding him less irritable than in the past. Confronted with a wartime rationing of gasoline, the couple had moved from the Tucson hills to a grand house closer to the center of town and just a few doors down from the Arizona Inn. Summers, of course, were spent back in Willowlake, but to escape the mounting tension of the news from Europe, Margaret and Noah took a Caribbean cruise together in August of that year, and a trip to Nassau with George and Juliet Rublee the following spring, where Margaret inaugurated a birth control program in the local hospital and had tea with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
    This turned out to be their last holiday together, for Noah’s health declined markedly through 1942. Normally stoic, he began to complain of feeling weak during the summer at Willowlake, where he suffered the first of several strokes. Barely strong enough to return to Arizona in the fall, he spent the entire winter in bed, content to gaze at the lovely mountains in the distance. By Margaret’s telling, she “was close to him the whole year…the household revolved around his every wish, his food and his comforts,” and they were alone together when he died peacefully in his sleep on June 21, 1943, just as he had hoped he would. In a conversation shortly before he died, he told her he could remember nothing about his life before she entered into it. “Only since I knew you have I lived,” is what she remembered him saying, an idealized rendering of the marriage, to be sure, but a comforting one that may have been true enough for an old man. 4
    Noah’s body was cremated, and Stuart and Grant flew out to pay their respects, but none of the Slee children or grandchildren ever turned up. Though Jim Slee was living not far away in California, Noah had made no attempt at a reconciliation with his eldest son, or with his only daughter, Elizabeth Willis, who acknowledged the occasion only by sending flowers. What remained of Noah’s great fortune in real estate and stock must have been put in Margaret’s name already, and