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this left her with more than a comfortable income on which to live, though she was never the enormously wealthy woman she would have been had the Depression not taken its toll. Noah had been paying their living expenses from an annuity that expired when he died, and less than $500 was left in his estate when it was probated. Loans still outstanding to his children were apparently forgiven, and Margaret instead made several subsequent attempts to restore a cordial relationship. 5
    Even at his death, Margaret had surprisingly little to say about her husband. She had mentioned him only once in her Autobiography , when she casually dismissed him as the “generous man” she married despite his “foibles.” To Dorothy Brush, she acknowledged only that “22 years of companionship has made an impression & I shall find it difficult to go on the stage of life alone.” Brush did better at capturing the essence of the relationship in the remarks she delivered at a memorial service at Willowlake in September, when Noah’s ashes were buried.
    â€œMargaret was quicksilver,” she said. “You [Noah] never could quite catch her & she kept you always fascinated.…Without her, heaven won’t be heaven for you, dear Noah.”
    With her husband finally gone, the “petty irritation & annoyances are wiped out,” Margaret later disclosed in the privacy of her journal. “Death removes them all. It wipes out the memories of the unreal. Only the goodness, kindness & loving things remain in my thoughts of J Noah. I’m glad of that.” It took several years alone, however, before she was willing to acknowledge him graciously in public, and before she ever once consented to identify herself as “Mrs. Margaret Sanger Slee.” Yet quite unlike Havelock Ellis after his wife’s death, she never made too much of these posthumous gestures to social convention. She never mistook sentimentality for love. 6
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    With so little emotion invested in her marriage, Margaret had few problems adjusting to life on her own. There were hundreds of telegrams and letters of sympathy demanding response, and Noah had scarcely been laid to rest, when she was called back East after Nan Higgins suffered a heart attack and then died suddenly in January of 1944. In Margaret’s lowest moments, she had always relied on her older sister’s resourcefulness, and this death, much more than Noah’s, came as a great shock to her. Nan was buried next to his gravesite in the plot at Willowlake, and Margaret wrote in her journal of the “big spot” left in her life. Feeling especially bereft in New York City, a place she could not visualize without the sister who had been there whenever she needed her, she quickly returned to Tucson, her despair intensified by the fact that relations with Ethel Higgins remained distant and tense. Nan had been living in an apartment Margaret kept above the clinic on West 16th Street. Ethel moved in when she died, but the two surviving women saw little of one another. For all practical purposes, Margaret was without sororal affection for the first time in her life.
    What is more, she was frantic with concern for Grant and Stuart, both of whom shipped overseas as military doctors in the fall of 1943. Grant joined the navy, went off on an aircraft carrier to the South Pacific and then commanded a casualty control ship. Stuart—despite a medical history of sinus troubles and a complicating tubercular infection—finally made it into the army, and served with the American invasion forces on the beaches of Normandy, where he rose to the rank of major. “Thank God they are trained to save lives not shatter them,” Margaret observed on first hearing of her sons’ entering the service. But as the war dragged on, she found it more and more difficult to appease her persistent anxiety. “I’ve always said since Peggy’s death that life could not