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hold me long if another of my children went before I do,” she wrote in her journal. “It is lonely. Lots to do. East-West with Pearl Buck. My painting & B.C. All big interests, but one gets a loneliness nevertheless.” 7
    Concern for the whereabouts and well-being of Stuart and Grant touched the wellsprings of her emotional life, and knowing that only one other human being in the world could possibly share her feelings, she reached out across the years to contact Bill Sanger, who was supporting his second wife and daughter by working as a humble architect on the staff of New York City’s Department of Water Supply, Gas, and Electricity. The letter she wrote him on this occasion was destroyed, along with the rest of her correspondence, but, as always, she saved Bill’s long, if halting, response, which overflowed with sentiments very close to those she was feeling.
    â€œHow strange it all seems,” Bill wrote, “this meeting the final outcome of one’s earlier view or ideal with the actual combat. This started out to be a war of invasion but it has reached the scope of world wide revolution.” Pausing to reflect on the perversity of Fascism, with its intent to annihilate the innocents—pious Jews, on the one hand, and idealistic Marxists, on the other—the letter then went on: “Yes that mighty brow of old Karl would have been all wrinkled up if he had lived to witness the events of these times.”
    Bill reserved his most touching observations for personal matters—how he used to carry Stuart up Locust Hill in Hastings; how little Grant, all spruced up in a white corduroy suit, had once waddled into a neighbor’s muddy lettuce patch; how Grant as a young man had come to see him from time to time, while Stuart resolutely stayed away. It was Margaret’s apparent mention of Peggy, however, that aroused his deepest emotions.
    â€œI have tried in the perspective of time to quiet the inward tears as the years rolled by; one had to steel oneself or go mad,” he admitted. “I am told that time heals all wounds—yes some—but there [are] those that will linger to the last moment of living memory.”
    He went on with several disjointed references—from the furnishings for which Margaret and he had once shared great affection, to the eclipse of the art world in New York—and then closed his letter on a poignant note: “Grant & Stuart are in the service,” he wrote, “and now in my little corner I feel I am part of the big surge to win this war.” 8
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    Coming of age had not been easy for Stuart Sanger, whose will was all but shattered by the early years of the Depression. Chastened by his hard luck on Wall Street, he finally straightened himself out professionally by following Grant to Cornell Medical School. Even as an intern at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, however, he remained prone to intense emotional outbursts and occasional bouts with alcohol. Still living on money from his mother and stepfather as he neared the age of forty, he observed wryly that by the time he finished he would be able to claim old age insurance “so that the future does not seem entirely dark.” The dependency nevertheless bred resentment and confusion, and on occasion he tried to explain himself to his mother, but she never seemed to have the time or inclination to listen. 9
    Like so many young men of this generation, the prospect of being drafted forced Stuart to make commitments and assume personal responsibilities he had long deferred. While training at the Leahy Clinic in 1941, he began dating Virginia Barbara Peabody, a young nurse from New Hampshire, twelve years his junior, who was also on the staff there. They were secretly married and in quick succession had two children: Margaret, born in November of 1941, six months after the wedding, and Barbara Nancy, born nineteen months later, only days after Noah’s death—the